One Photo Focus January 2016

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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One Photo Focus: June

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.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!

After Before Week 51

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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After Before Week 43: One Photo Focus

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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After-Before Friday Challenge: Week 42

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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After Before Week 40 Challenge

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:

• Gradient: transparent to white
• Style: Radial
• Angle: 170.54
• Scale: 100%
• Reverse and Align with layer selected

And voila!

To see more examples from this challenge, visit After Before Week 40 Challenge.

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After Before One Photo Focus: Week 39

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.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!