Fantasy Island

Many of the photos I've edited for this blog so far have created illusions while still bearing some resemblance to reality. Today I went for something totally different.

The "island" in this image is actually part of a leaf.

What the Camera Saw

As my focus at the moment is on shooting photos for the theme "Noir" (black) with the aim of using one specific editing process to keep the style constant, I've decided there isn't much point in setting my camera to shoot in black and white right now.

Instead I've been using the "Dramatic Tone" setting I mentioned previously. In the right conditions it really can produce magical results, as was the case with this photo - a fair reflection of the scene I saw yesterday.

"Dramatic Tone" version straight out of camera

Cameras don't usually cope too well with contrasty light though, and without that setting I'd have been left with this image, which is what the camera actually saw:

Unedited RAW photos - what the camera saw

Starting with that version it would have taken a lot of editing to get anything close to what I was after.

Of course neither of those was the look I wanted for my final image. Taking both into Photoshop and applying the same editing methods produced two dramatically different images.

The version created from the RAW original ended up really dark with far too much detail lost in the shadows.

The "Dramatic Tone" version, on the other hand, produced just the look I was after with only minimal editing.

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Linking up to Through My Lens and Black and White View.

Keeping My Options Open

Unedited RAW

I've mentioned previously that I enjoy using a high contrast black and white setting on my camera. When I'm not using that one, another favourite is one that Olympus calls "Dramatic Tones". It's similar to an HDR (high dynamic range) effect but sometimes adds some strange highlights or dark spots which aren't always pleasing. But I always have a RAW version as back-up in case things go wrong.

In the case of this palm tree that I shot a few months ago, the unedited RAW version looks really dull.

Dramatic Tones - as shot

On the other hand the Dramatic Tones shot has produced some halos around the tree combined with a few really dark patches in the sky.













With a lot of experimentation in Photoshop, I came up with something a bit more natural though I'm still not entirely happy with the result.

Edited in Photoshop

Dramatic Tones converted to sepia

Once I was done with colour I decided to try some sepia conversions.

The version created from the Dramatic Tones original produced an interesting, though rather dark, result.

Photoshop edit converted to sepia

Converting the version created in Photoshop produced a much lighter tree.








I'm really not sure which I like better.

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Linking up with Photo Friday.

Why I like to shoot in colour

As I said in a previous post, I often shoot using a  high contrast black and white setting, but I always make sure to use RAW + jpg so that I have a colour version available as well. Although it gives me a rough idea of what the scene will look like, sometimes that high contrast setting just doesn't give the best result and then I go back to Photoshop to improve on the result.

This photo was one such case.

The high contrast version lost a lot of detail from the sky, so I tried several different edits in both black and white and colour and this was one of my favourites.

Before I started using a digital camera I occasionally experimented with black and white, but not often because film was expensive and it wasn't possible to switch back to using colour until the film was finished. However one thing I learnt back then was that putting a colour filter in front of the lens could dramatically change the resulting photo. Sadly there was no screen to show the result, so if I got it wrong, that was then end of it.

In the days of digital, shooting colour allows one to add that colour filter during the editing process, so here are a couple of different edits, showing just how much difference they can make.

First the infra-red filter, which darkened the blue sky and made the green in the trees look lighter and brighter.

And then the one that I'm not really too keen on, but had to show for comparison. The blue filter turned the sky really pale, with the clouds and crane becoming far less conspicuous, while the trees are now much too dark.

Finally a word on the photo itself. Looking at this photo which was taken a little over two years ago makes me realise just how fast my city is changing. There is now a big building standing on that spot. But there is still a lot of construction going on all over Johannesburg.

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Linking up with Through My Lens and Black and White View.

One Photo- Four Moods

Once again I've been playing with Photoshop.

The photo I selected was a very ordinary photo of some trees, taken on a late summer's day a couple of years ago.

First the dreamy version:

Next something resembling autumn:

A high-key black and white conversion transforms summer into winter:

And a much darker conversion makes the woods look like the kind of place you'd want to stay far away from:

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Linking up to Friday Greens, Photo Friday, Scenic Weekends, The Weekend in Black and White and NF Trees n Bushes .

Bringing Out the Sunbeams

I don't often show unedited photos, but this post is about editing, so I'm forced to make an exception to my rule.

A couple of years ago I took a photo of a beautiful sky full of clouds with a few sunbeams bursting through. I was really disappointed with the result. My camera tried its best to expose the scene correctly but there was simply too much contrast for it to see what I had seen.

The unedited original

Back then I tried to edit the scene to enhance those sunbeams, but in the process the landscape turned to a silhouette.

I like a good silhouette, but I wasn't particularly happy with this one.

I gave up after that because I didn't know how to fix it.

Last night I decided to have another go at editing that photo.

With the help of some recently acquired Photoshop plug-ins, I was amazed at the detail I was able to recover.

I still wasn't totally happy though. I'd now created something that was much brighter than what I'd seen that day. So this morning it was back to Photoshop to try again.

I think that's about as close as I'm going to get to reality.

Finally I decided to see what it looked like in black and white.

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Linking up to Skywatch Friday.