My Photoshop skills are minimal, but I keep trying to make my photos bounce. Clearly it's going to take more work than I've put in so far. I took a couple of photos of the flowers that are hanging out with my tobacco plants* yesterday and played with them in Photoshop this morning.
Nature beats KT again. Like that's a surprise.
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| My doctored photo, with emphasis on the reds. |
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| The original in all its floweriffic glory. |
* - Several of the tobacco plants are now near or over 3' tall. They're growing very fast.
6 comments:
Whatever you did seems to have brought out yellow throughout the photo. That leaves the red with less to pop against, if that makes sense. The white and green give better contrast to the red. Maybe if you could play up the blue in the greens, you might succeed in getting the red to stand out better. But I have no idea how to do that. Never played with photoshop.
Or simply make it as natural and lifelike as possible. I hate over photoshopped pics which seems to be becoming the norm. No subtle gradations, no understated colours, all glitz and 'popping out'. One tool I like, being and old time photographer, is Alien Skin, with which you can mimic the characteristics of all the old films, colour and b and w.
Anon, thanks so much for the expert advice!
ligneus, I was going for the deliberately artificial look. What I really want to be able to create is almost a neon effect from colorful photos. Kind of like a comic-book version of the image.
That's fine and it's fun, it can be decorative but it takes away from what photography does better than any other medium, shows the subject exactly as it is and in the other aspect, picks out that little instant in time that often can't be discerned in any other way, a la Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment'which involves often some anticipation. Anyway that is what fascinates me in photography. It is in some respects a matter of degree, when making b and w prints in the darkroom we used to say the negative is just the beginning, it's what you do with it by means of various techniques that makes the picture so some manipulation has a long history. Man Ray is an example of extreme manipulation.
Tricky to write about while dodging being too dogmatic about it. Horses for courses and all that but something about photoshopped prints rubs me the wrong way, bit like Charlie Parker does compared to previous more musical jazz. Philip Larkin btw, who used to write a column on jazz, once called CP's jazz a vinegary drizzle.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/may/21/jazz-philip-larkin-john-harris
Reference Back. Philip Larkin.
“That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.
Oliver's Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique Negroes blew
Our of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.
Truly, though our element is time,
We're not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.
Went OT a bit there!
That was beautiful.
Playing with the gamma is generally the limit of my tinkering; it is much more likely to make stuff look like I remember it.... and then take it into the cartoon zone.
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