Patrick H., wanted to know:
How do we know this is a real flower? You could have bought a silk flower and tried to trick us. I will need some sort of proof.
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I was thinking about a photo essay of all the editing I do on photos to make them more interesting and pleasing to the eye. I had in mind to do a half dozen or so but when I saw Patrick H's comment and I stopped laughing out loud, I decided to do it with today's photo and the spring garden photo from yesterday.
I believe since Patrick is new and only has made two comments in his life here on gather, that he is someone who is unhappy with me. Probably because of my stand on copyright law here on Gather. An alter ego identity is a good place to hide… You go for it Patrick!
Here is my balloon Flower at my brother's home in upstate New York last summer. I believe it was taken on the macro setting but I'm not sure.
I used HP Image Zone and twisted the bloom around so I could get rid of most of the fence holding the flower up when I cropped it and made it just the bloom without the rest of the plant.
I then edited the image, making the color brighter, the edges sharper and a few more twigs to the photo. The end result to my eye is more pleasing than the big picture.
With the Spring Garden photo I did the same but this time I didn't need to turn the photo. I cropped it to get rid of some of it and then I just made it brighter and sharper and to my eye more interesting.
I love my HP Image Zone that came with my printer/scanner and I am now taking the time to learn a bit about Adobe Photo Delux that I own but haven't had time to play with yet.
Do you want to see more examples of editing in the future or does this bore you? Let me know.
My camera is HP Photosmart 635.
© Marilyn (PaintsOnSlate) February 21, 2008
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Comments: 56
I especially love the last photo, with the tulips.
I use MS Picture It--it came with my computer. Would really like Adobe--so much you can do with photos. And it's fun.
Oh yeah, and you were asking me in an article of mine the other day about how to make links in your article, but now that I think about it, it looks like you already figured it out, seeing as how you make Patrick's name a link. Guess I got here too late to tell ya. Shoot!! ; )
Oh yeah, and thanks for posting this to All Photo Essays Here.
When you are in the publish article thing on here, underneath where you put the name of your article are all those little icons (the blank piece of paper, the scissors, etc.). Well all the way on the end is what looks like a chain and beside that a broken chain. You can use the one that looks like a chain to make the link. Just highlight the word you want to make into a link, click that chain and then paste the link you want it to go to in the box it calls up. You can also highlight and then right click on the highlighted words. Then click insert/edit link in the little box that comes up.
Try it and let me know if that works!!
I have yet to edit a RAW image, but I'm going to try soon (probably using the Pentax software). As I understand it, one gains a couple of f-stops of latitude. I bracketed all over the place and read an article of suggested exposure settings for an eclipse beforehand, but I don't think I have very many good shots (300mm effective lens focal length).
I've mainly been using free-ware (Picassa) to edit. It is simple and effective. I've done a little editing from within Flickr (forget the name of that software), and some with the Olympus program. The Olympus program crashed a lot on my PC, and I eventually became fed up, though it did work well at times.
BTW, here is one of my moon pics from the eclipse (from a JEPG, not RAW file): first photo in lunar eclipse series by J K Bashkin
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977266502&nav=Namespace
They're sort of spongy-like.
In the cold and dark, I lost control of my ISO settings (I'm still getting used to the camera), and this caused problems when the full eclipse was in view: my exposure times were long because I could not get ISO back up up to 400 or 800, where it had been, and there was too much jitter on my lightweight tripod. At least I may learn it better for next time.
I was going to turn this into a photo essay, but the shots aren't that great and it is a pain to do the hokey poky to transfer from Flickr to Gather (I did some final edited on Flickr, and when downloading I kept getting confused about the time sequence of the photos, so I gave up, at least for now).
Thanks for all the great articles and photos!
For better shots, see this series of eclipse photos from another photographer on Flickr who sent them to me via DIGG.
Blessings...
Girly Comments & Graphics
Very nice article :))
Keep it up. I never get tired of seeing how others tweak their photos.
And yes, Linda G. is right, even film photos get tweaked in the darkroom.
I have been trying my best though to learn as much as I can about photography and photo editing. I've moved from no editing ever, to really messing my photos up, to over saturating, to finally beginning to get my photos where I want them.
I like using the Cannon Zoom Browser EX that came with my camera... it works quite well and is really easy to use...