Week 2 Part 1 : Filters Gone Wild

The assignment was to try artistic filters and "let go". I used a picture I took of a friend as a new avatar for his Facebook page ( standard 4 lights shot )

I tried randomly the filters and finally did the following: I made 3 copies of the image and applied 3 differents filters: mosaic on the background, chrome on the intermediate layer and reticulation on the top. I played with the parameters on the different layers and finally I used different blending mode to have the final result: luminosity for the second layer and color burn on the third.

so when you add the 3 level of randomness ( filter choice, parameters value and blending modes ) this is what you get:

WEEK 1 : Fixing a Photo

rotate this photo so the bridge is horizontal then resize

To straighten and crop, I chose a guide as a way to verify horizontality, the rotation tool and then I cropped manually to achieve the right image aspect ratio so that after a linear resize the picture has the expected 600x399 size. this allowed me to remove part of the right side that was a little bit overwhelming. 

I then did the basic processing I would do to this type of picture: remove some of the blue haze on the other side of the bay with the curve tool on a selected area with some feather, and add a little bit of contrast  to the same part, pushed a little the color of the bridge with the hue saturation tool ( red chanel) , sharpened with the smart sharpen tool and a gradient mask so that the foreground is sharpened more, reduced the strong shadow in the front with a color range selection, boosting the luminosity while reducing contrast on the selected zone. the final touch has been just a little of warming photographic filter to give more the feeling of a warm summer day.

I finally resized the picture to 600x399 @ 72 dpi and uploaded to the blog

Blog Creation

I created this blog to track my progress in the DM/IS10C Photoshop class. 

I am 58, French ( nobody's perfect..), I moved recently to California. I am an electronics engineer.

I was very much into photography as a student ( the kind you do in dark rooms, seems 100 years ago…), won few contests, was even offered a job as a product photographer for one of the main advertising agency in Paris but was not confident enough to take the plunge so I chose the "easy" career path as an engineer, stopped photography completely  ( and destroyed my thousands of pictures!) and came back to it about 15 years ago.

I have been using photoshop on and off since version 2 mainly for photo retouch at work for presentations ( simple jobs) and more recently as a hobby, but always in a simplistic way, like the people who use Word like a typewriter not understanding the power of styles. I am comfortable with the basic stuff and I can achieve a lot but my efficiency is minimum. I am interested mainly in the methodologies (the right use of adjustment layers, masks , channels, what about blending modes…) and mixing images with vector based objects ( text or drawing). I am also very interested in understanding how to have an efficient workflow ( bridge, RAW editor, back up, color calibration especially in the printing environment ) I use additional tools out of photoshop like HDR, focus stacks, panorama…

here I add one of my pictures to test picture integration in the post.

OK it seems to work. that would be a "before" picture

and this would be the "after" picture