Today we celebrate the solstice and the commencement of astronomical summer. We had to beat the rush, however, by turning on the AC – the other AC 😜 yesterday – with temperatures creeping into the 80s, humid 80s, I hasten to add. It will be even hotter on Sunday and early next week. The other news, now that summer has officially arrived, is that the daylight hours will now get shorter..
Meanwhile . . .
Sometimes, I am able to do something in post that will assist Sue with her photos: not often, but sometimes. This playground train is an example.
On that day, Sue was prompted to photograph a train, but the theme for the week was also blue. Unfortunately, the train was red, but I managed to change the colour in Photoshop. I was also able to replace the dull sky with one with a bluer one.
On another day that continued the blue theme, she was also asked to photograph steam. She had Shauna bring over her kettle, which, you are about to see, lights up in blue when it boils.
It was a tricky photo to set up because it needed backlight to highlight the steam, but that threw off the rest of the photo. In the end, Sue hid the light under black construction paper as best she could. I didn't do much in edit except to thicken and highlight the steam just a little bit more to help make it more visible.
Sometimes, I play around with my own photos, doing this and that to see what will happen. This is another version of an iris photo that I showed you last week. I extracted the flower and played with adding a new background.
Finally for today, I repeat the photo of Sue's grandfather that I showed recently in another post.
I took it with a flash many decades ago, but the flash left a very large and dark shadow on the right side. after some fiddling and faddling, I managed to remove the black shadow, but that left a hole in the background, so I replaced the background completely. By trial and error I managed to come up with an acceptable photo.
For me that is often the purpose and fun of Photoshop — to improve a poor image to an acceptable quality. Of course, the best way would be to get the photo right to begin with,in camera, but that is often not possible. I do find some satisfaction in occasionally being able to bring a problematic photo up to the level of acceptability.
It’s finally heating up here as well with 92F expected today and the AC will be on early. I agree with your assessment of using a photo editing program to improve an image.
ReplyDeleteI know I don't fully understand you Canadians at times but why do you observe the summer solstice a day early?
ReplyDeleteI especially like that steam picture.
ReplyDeleteThis year's summer solstice is on June 21 sometime early. Getting ready for a natural event is just one of our human attempts to understand the way the world works. AC (the man) convinced me finally that the earth doesn't change it's tilt back and forth upon solstices! This old dog did learn new tricks. As far as photo editing, it can certainly help with those which aren't very clear (but not blurred unfortunately.)
ReplyDeleteI love the blue train. I never added photoshop to my repertoire, knowing full well it was a hole I would fall into and never return. But I have to say it has some amazing benefits as you shared here.
ReplyDelete