Laura Macky Photography has provided a lovely image for us to play with this month. Here’s her original:
After playing around with the contrast and brightness and enjoying a bit of cropping, I decided to use one of the black & white presets I purchased from Little Lusker. The final one I settled on is Film. Here is the end result:
Stacy, thanks, as always, for a fun challenge. For more from this challenge, visit One Photo Focus: January.
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For this week’s challenge, Stacy gave us one of hers. It’s a lovely image that, for me, is a little over-exposed. Seemed like a great challenge!
Before
When I opened the image in Photoshop, I used these settings on the RAW converter:
Which resulted in this image:
Finally, it seemed like a gentle sepia wash would give the image a lovely nostalgic feeling:
Stacy, thanks, as always, for a fun challenge. For more from this challenge, visit One Photo Focus: June.
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Life has become a bit hectic lately, so for this week’s challenge, I have only the after and before to show you, but I can tell you what I did to get from point A to point B.
First, here’s the after:
Now the before:
As you can see, the image was almost completely black and really useless. I used the RAW converter in Photoshop to gently lighten the image, then I used a layer to removed a couple of blemishes and another layer to add an iris blur to focus on her profile.
To see more examples from this challenge, visit After-Before Week 51 Challenge.
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This week’s original photo was taken by Cee Neuner. She hosts several weekly photo challenges herself. Go over to her site and check them out. Here’s her original photo:
First, when I opened the file in the RAW converter, I decided to keep the settings that came with the photo.
Then I cropped the photo just a bit to put the bush’s trunk more to the far left of the image.
Then I created a new layer and removed the background from it, leaving only the bush in the new layer. I lightened the top layer and darkened the bottom one.
Lastly, I used a feathered eraser to soften the edges of the bush so that it isn’t as obvious that it’s been “PhotoShoped”, and here is the final image.
To see more examples from this challenge, visit After Before Week 43 Challenge.
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For the challenge this week, I went very simply. I did a few tweaks in the RAW converter, and that was it. Here’s the original:
As you can see, my nephew is a not only a great model, but also a great sport. Here are the settings from the RAW converter:
And with just those changes, I found that I had transformed the image to this:
Subtle changes, but worth the effort.
To see more examples from this challenge, visit After Before Week 42 Challenge.
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This week is a standard After Before photo challenge from Stacy at Visual Venturing. I reached back into my bag of old photos to find one that I really wanted to do some crazy fun things to this week. Here’s the final result:
So, are you wondering what the original looked like? Here it is:
I love this image, and I’ve posted a black and white version of it here. When I opened the image in PhotoShop, I used these settings on the RAW converter:
These resulted in an image with heightened sharpness, colors, and contrast.
Next, I created a duplicate layer and selected the Polar Coordinates filter at 100%.
I love how the Steinway & Sons wrapped. Finally, I added a softening gradient fill layer using using the following settings:
And voila!
To see more examples from this challenge, visit After Before Week 40 Challenge.
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For the challenge this week, Stacy at Visual Venturing has provided a lovely photo by Loré Dombaj. Here is my final version
So, I started with the original image:
It really is a lovely image. I thought it would be interesting to bring more focus to the flowers in the center. First, I toned down the saturation on the background layer and then created a black and white layer.
Next, I erased a large, feathered circle in the center to bring out the colors from the background layer.
Next, I bumped up the saturation on only the reds.
And finally, I deepened the contrast.
To see more examples from this challenge, visit After Before One Photo Focus Week 39.
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For this week’s After Before Friday challenge, I don’t have the inbetween images to show you. It’s been one of those weeks. But I hope you like what I’ve done with this image anyway. I’ll start with the After:
This photo is from our recent Scotland trip. We were walking down a road to a ruined castle, and the stone wall was so intriguing I had to take a photo of it. (We didn’t know the people who were ahead of us, but I think they add interest to the picture.)
Here’s the Before:
I think it’s still a lovely photo, even without any processing. For the After photo, I maxed out the contrast, moved the hue a little to the red side of things, and saturated the colors just a bit (less than 15%). Then I cropped it to more of a panoramic feel.
Let me know what you think!
To see more After-Before entries, visit After-Before Friday Week 38.
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For this week’s After-Before Friday challenge, I decided to go small in terms of both my subject and the amount of post-processing I wanted to do. While at my sister’s house taking senior pictures for a great high school senior (pictures to come later), I came across this sweet little pine cone and couldn’t resist taking it’s picture, too.
When I opened it in PhotoShop, I made a few small adjustments in the RAW converter.
These changes produced this image.
I really liked how it was looking, but the pine cone seemed a bit lost in the image, so I decided to crop it close and square.
To see more After-Before entries, visit After-Before Friday Week 37.
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This is my second time participating in Stacy Fisher’s After Before Friday challenge. This week, we were all given the same photo to process. Here’s the original:
First, I used PhotoShops’s RAW converter to make the following adjustments:
Here is the photo after opening it from the converter:
Next, I changed the photo to black and white. Then I heightened the sharpness to give it a slightly gritty, urban feel.
And finally, I added more fog using a gradient layer.
For more from this challenge, visit After Before Friday One Photo Focus Week 35.
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nancy merrill photography 