Friday, March 26, 2010

Day 84: Feeding the ducks

Still catching up on posting.  We took a morning stroll to central part to feed the ducks and then have cinnamon rolls at the local cafe in the park.  It was a bit of a dreary morning with a lot of cloud cover, which made it very easy to take photos.  However it also made my photos look very cool, so I had fun editing.  I tried some different things and I thought I would show some before and after, since I don’t do that very often.

All of the before pictures are straight off the camera.  In general I took the following steps:

  1. Crop
  2. Clone out unwanted or distracting items
  3. White balance correction in levels to select a white and a black
  4. Adjust exposure and fill light, and up the blacks in curves by pulling up on the middle of the curve and down on the bottom part of the curve.
  5. Burn or dodge certain parts of the photos to adjust exposure in specific areas.
  6. Run PW warmer action.  Change opacity as desired and mask out skin if it was too much by using soft brush at 20% opacity.  Sometimes run the action twice and set the opacity of the second warmer layer to 20-50% opacity.
  7. In some cases run PW fresh and colorful action, adjust opacity of light layer, soft light layer, and of group of layers.
  8. Run PW edge burn and adjust opacity as desired.
  9. Sharpen using Smart Sharpen set at Lens Blur, 100%, 0.2 pixels.
  10. Watermarks on original photos are from WindowsLive Writer, otherwise I added the watermarks in Photoshop using a brush I created and hawksmont.com for the flower.

DSC_2869

DSC_2869_edit_wm DSC_2860 DSC_2860_edit_wm DSC_2846 DSC_2846_edit_wm DSC_2832 DSC_2832_edit_wmDSC_2820  DSC_2820_edit_wm DSC_2760 DSC_2760_edit_wm DSC_2755  DSC_2755_edit_wm DSC_2742DSC_2742_edit_wm

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