PhotoShop – Page 2 – nancy merrill photography

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.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!

A Photo a Week Challenge: Muted Colors

Color is an important part of photography. Some images work best with over-saturated colors; some work best with no colors (I love good black and white photographs). For this week’s challenge, I found a picture that I really liked, but was over-exposed. When I started working on it, I realized that if I muted the colors down, I was able to “save” the photo. And the result looks great and has a slightly nostalgic feel to it.

IN A NEW POST CREATED FOR THIS CHALLENGE, SHARE PHOTOS WITH SOME OR ALL OF THE COLORS MUTED.

Everyone is welcome to participate, even if your blog isn’t about photography.

Here’s how it works:

Each week, I’ll come up with a theme and post a photo that I think fits. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog (a new post!) anytime before the following Thursday, when the next photo theme will be announced.
To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “A Photo a Week Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ and “Photo a Week” tags.
Come back here and post a link to your image in the comments for this challenge.
Follow nancy merrill photography so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements.

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.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!

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.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!

A Photo a Week Challenge: Brighten Up Your Day

As we in the northern hemisphere make our way out of the darkness of winter, I thought it would be fun to reminisce about the warmth and brightness of the summer sun. I played around in PhotoShop to lighten and warm up this image of Baby C. I hope you like the results and spend a few minutes basking in the glow of a late summer afternoon.

IN A NEW POST CREATED FOR THIS CHALLENGE, SHARE PHOTOS OF BRIGHT IMAGES.

Whether your picture is naturally bright from the sun or other lighting, or you create the brightness with post-processing, have fun and get creative.

Everyone is welcome to participate, even if your blog isn’t about photography.

Here’s how it works:

Each week, I’ll come up with a theme and post a photo that I think fits. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog (a new post!) anytime before the following Thursday, when the next photo theme will be announced.
To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “A Photo a Week Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ and “Photo a Week” tags.
Come back here and post a link to your image in the comments for this challenge.
Follow nancy merrill photography so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements.

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!

After Before Friday – Week 38

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.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!

A Photo a Week Challenge: Saturation

sat·u·ra·tion (saCHəˈrāSH(ə)n/) noun
the state or process that occurs when no more of something can be absorbed, combined with, or added.

I don’t know about you, but I love playing around with saturation. Over-saturation can take your image from the normal to the unreal. Under-saturated images can create the feeling of nostalgia or, when combined with heightened sharpness, a gritty, urbanized texture. Whether you prefer one over the other or like your images to have a more realistic, at the moment feel, saturation is an important tool to have in your post-processing arsenal of abilities. Have fun this week playing around with levels of saturation. In your post, include before, middle, and after photos.

IN A NEW POST CREATED FOR THIS CHALLENGE, SHARE PHOTOS WITH DIFFERENT LEVELS OF SATURATION.

Everyone is welcome to participate, even if your blog isn’t about photography.

Here’s how it works:

Each week, I’ll come up with a theme and post a photo that I think fits. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog (a new post!) anytime before the following Thursday, when the next photo theme will be announced.
To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “A Photo a Week Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ and “Photo a Week” tags.
Come back here and post a link to your image in the comments for this challenge.
Follow nancy merrill photography so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements.

After Before Challenge Week 37

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.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!

After Before Friday One Photo Focus Week 35

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: