PhotoShop Lesson: Accentuating Snowy Trees

Thank you for all of the lovely compliments on my snow photos yesterday.  Most of the success of these photos was because the light during the snowstorm was completely perfect.  All I had to do was adjust the White Balance on my camera, frame the shots, and click away. 

When I loaded the memory card into my laptop to view the photos, I decided that they could use a little bit of tweaking, a lot like I did when I used to develop photos in the darkroom in the Dark Ages of film photography.  It was a simple matter to use PhotoShop to darken the trees, increase the contrast, and sharpen up the blowing snow.

Here is what the photo of the three trees looked like straight out of the camera.  It's okay, but I knew it could be better.

After we finish with it, it will look like this:

Open the photo in PhotoShop.  The first thing I did was adjust the size of the image to 640 x 480, so I was working on the image in its actual size.

To adjust the levels to darken the trees, Click 'Image',  'Adjust',  'Levels'.

And you get a pop-up window that looks like this.  Click on the black eyedropper icon, then click somewhere on the photo that you want to tell PhotoShop should be true black.  I clicked on the center of the hollow part of the front tree.  If you don't get the result you want when you click on the photo the first time, click around until you like what you see.  If you totally hate the results, click Cancel and close the window, and your photo will remain unchanged.

My next step was to increase the white range (Don't quote me on this terminology, because I don't know if that's what it's really called.)  Again, click to adjust the Levels.  This time, I grabbed the white-point slider and I moved it until I liked what I saw.

To make a sharper contrast between the lights and the darks, click 'Image', 'Adjust', 'Brightness/Contrast'.  Click and hold the sliders, and drag them where you think the photo looks best.  I brightened the photo a bit, and increased the contrast considerably.

If you look at the original photo, you see that I had to deal with the pesky issue of my daughter's car antenna in the lower left corner.  This distraction was dispatched fairly quickly with a few strokes of the PhotoShop airbrush.  (I can show you how to use airbrushing later, if there's interest.)  The "H" on my Hartwood Roses watermark disguised the fact that there was ever an antenna in the picture.

The last step is to sharpen the photo, to accentuate the texture and details, and to focus on the emotion of the blowing snow.  Click 'Filter', 'Sharpen', 'Sharpen'.

That's all there is to it!

I use PhotoShop 6.0, which is the oldest version of PhotoShop that will run on my new laptop.  There are newer versions out there, but they are considerably different than what I'm used to and I didn't want to have to learn how to use them.  I have never used any other photo program besides PhotoShop, but I imagine that the concept of adjusting levels and contrast and sharpening images is similar no matter what program you have.

Class is over.  Any questions?

Tips For a Better Blog ... Large Photos

Do you use the largest possible photos on your blog?  If not, here's a quick Blogger lesson to show you how.

This sunrise photo ...

... wouldn't have nearly the same impact if I had left it the size that Blogger made it when I imported it into this post.  See?

The size that a photo appears in my posts has nothing to do with the photo's file size. All of my blog photos are 640 x 480.  I save them this size I when I edit them in PhotoShop.  (That's also where the watermarks come from)

While writing a blog post, when I insert a photo, it looks like this on the screen:

Click on the photo in the Blogger editor, the photo will highlight and a bar with various selections will appear below it.  To display the photo as large as possible, which I do, click 'X-Large'.

Your photo will now look like this:

and when you publish your post, your photo will be big and beautiful!

Any Questions?

Today's Color is ... Red.

With everything popping in the garden right now, I bet ya thought I was going to say 'green'.

This is project #3 for C & C Photography's spring photography workshop.

I chose red for my subject, to show the wonderful variation in the colors of spring ... all you have to do is look carefully.

Enjoy!

As you can see, red and green aren't just for Christmas anymore.

All of this beautiful spring growth promises armloads of flowers in a few weeks. 

Be sure to visit C & C Photography to see which colors the other participants chose.  They're a very creative bunch, and I'm always in awe of what their work.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog)

Photo Workshop Project #2 ... with more Daffodils.

This week's project focuses on Composition and Perspective.  I used my time yesterday morning outside with the daffodils, along with my sign and the cool concrete fence, as the subjects of my still life.

Visit C and C Photography for the list of the other participants, and to visit their blogs to see some AWESOME photography.

Here is what the scene looks like straight on, as I walked up to the fence, just as the eye sees it.

With Image #2, we were to get a 'bird's eye' view of our subject.  Instead, I took the 'worm's perspective' and laid on the ground and shot from a distance.

Here's #3, from a completely different angle that puts the fence on a nice diagonal.

 

Photo #4 has the main subject off center ... I used the fence post as a new focal point.

 

With our final photo, we were to 'unfocus' our scene.  I used a shallow depth of field to put only the very front daffodil in focus, with the ones behind fading into the distance.

As you can see, if you've read the sign, we open for the season on May 29.  The roses in the garden will be blooming their little heads off, and the roses in the nursery will be ready to go to their new homes by then.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog)

Saturday Morning Photoshoot ... Just Me and My Egg.

Camilla (from Bloom) and Carolyn (from Rose Notes) are at it again.  We all had so much fun with their photo workshop last fall, that we're signed up for another round.

Assignment #1, play with exposure and make a supermodel out of an egg.

Hmmm.  Okay.

My egg and I burned a lot of pixels trying to do something imaginative.  Here's the part of the assignment where we were supposed to play with light and black and white backgrounds.

I put a sun flare on this in PhotoShop, to spice it up a bit.

I liked playing with the harsh shadows in my south-facing dining room window.  It started to remind me of going on a school field trip to the planetarium.

Then the egg and I went outside to see what was blooming ... this is mostly a garden blog, after all.

The grass is certainly greening up ... and those old-fashioned Butter and Eggs daffodils are my absolute favorites.

I took this last photo in direct sunshine, with the egg at the bottom of a round crystal vase.  I love how the reflections and shadows blur the boundaries of the egg.

If you want to see some really creative people playing with their own eggs, head over to C & C Photography.  I'm going there myself right now, to see what everyone else has done.

A Bit of Green

I'm not Irish ... but after a winter like we had, I can certainly appreciate a little green.

It was wonderful to be outside today in the sunshine!

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog.)

Photography Workshop ... Project #4 (a day late)

This week's project required more time and introspection that I had ... until this morning.  Things are fairly upside down here, and I find that I am easily distracted.  My father-in-law is quite ill, and my husband and his brother are taking turns staying with their parents to help their mother. 

I realized early this week that there was no way I could do this project exactly as outlined.  Instead of taking new photographs, I dug through my files to find photos I already have on hand ... and I tried to see them in a new way.  I hope this fulfills the spirit of the assignment.
 

Part One:  Create portraits without showing the faces of your subjects. 

These are my helpers.

My 5-year-old grandson is a very enthusiastic garden helper.  He is always available to dig a hole, or flick a Japanese Beetle.

My husband is the king of destructive tools.  Whether we are demolishing the wood floor in our basement (whose idea was it to put an oak floor in the damp basement of an old house?) or cleaning up storm damage, Steve is always game to jump in and get the job done.

Part Two:  Step from behind the camera and show my face.

This one is hard for me.  I'm the one behind the camera, the one in control of the images ... I rarely pass my camera to someone else.  (does this sound like you, too?)  Here is a little mosaic I created this morning, using photos taken of me in the past couple of years.

(from top to bottom)

1.  I helped decorate the Governor's Mansion for Christmas a couple of years ago.  This is one of the pitiful little arrangements I made.

2.  My dogs and me, having breakfast on a trip to Dewey Beach.

3.  Queen of Power Tools. 

4.  Governor's Mansion, again, sitting on the front steps with the garland I made.

5.  Dewey Beach, again ... it was cold!

6.  This is almost what I look like now ... it was taken at our daughter's outdoor wedding this summer, in blinding sunshine.  No more pixie haircut for a while.

This was the last project for this workshop.  It has been a challenge to look at my photography in a different way .. I hope I am a better photographer because of it. 

I have loved getting to know other photo bloggers.  When I began this blog last year, I had no idea that there was a whole world of other blogs out there ... all connected into a network.  This project forced me to venture from my own blog-world, and visit others to see what they had to say.  I am pleased to be a part of this community, and I will continue to visit with others often. 

Please stop by to see what the other workshop participants have created.  The list is HERE.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog)

Photography Workshop ... Project #3

This week's assignment was more difficult ... I took the time to do it correctly this time.  Here's exactly what we were supposed to do:

"Select a theme like simplicity,serenity, happiness,excitement or loneliness. Next go for a walk and only take pictures that fit into your theme. Create a set of 10 such photos. While this sounds simple it is more difficult than it seems. It will be hard not to photograph other things, but this focused approach will heighten your senses. It will also develop patience and the drive to look and hard for that particular theme."  Chris Orwig- Visual Poetry

My theme is Peace.

I started photographing in the house ... there's nothing much more peaceful than sleeping cats.  I then drove to Culpeper to take my mother to lunch (stopping along the way to photograph whatever I saw that fit my theme).  I made a few stops on the way home, too.

Here are my photos, in the order I took them. 

Be sure to visit the other participants, to see which theme they chose.  For the list, click HERE.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog)