My GPS Camera Phone

Adjusting levels, saturation and other settings in Photoshop can have a dramatic effect on the mood of an image. Take the image below, for example. What you see is a standard landscape photo of Paynes Prairie in late fall. The lush greenery is becoming dying brownery, accented with patches of yellow flowers. The sky is overcast with no defined cloud patterns. Overall, a pretty plain photo, aside from being shot through a fence. Nice, but plain.

I like Paynes Prairie, though, and I want to save this photo somehow. Photoshop holds the key. It holds many keys, but I’m going to use only a few this time around. Via the magic and awesomeness of adjustment layers, I’ll take the ordinary photo above and turn it into something moody and dark. The same could be done to make it happy and light, but I’m going in the other direction (which some might even call drab and plain!). The beauty of using adjustment layers is that you alter the photo’s appearance without altering the original photographic layer.

Open the photo in Photoshop and crop it to your liking. Using this cropped selection, add an adjustment layer to take out most of the color – in this case, everything except yellow – by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation.” Take all colors down via the Saturation slider to their lowest value, then increase the yellow slider a bit to make the flowers pop more. You should have a semi-desaturated image at this point.

Next, add another adjustment layer for level adjustment by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Curves…” (or adding a Levels… layer). Adjust the levels to your liking. There are endless possibilities with this setting, just like the saturation layer, so don’t be afriad to play around with multiple variations. It comes down to personal preference.

To finish this off, we want to bring those clouds up a bit more, since there’s really no definition in the gray, overcast sky. This can be easily done with the burn tool. Make sure to burn the highlights, midtones and shadows in order to achieve maximum effect.

Now sit back and enjoy your creation!

What we’ve got here is…a bunch of clouds! Yes, no fooling around this week. However, it is two cloud photos merged together with hue and saturation adjusted to make it more blue. Other than that, it’s nothing much really.

Just when you thought it was safe to guess correctly, I pull fast one. Actually, I had no idea that some of you would think I was trying to fool you with this photo. However, Dan’s second guess of waves breaking was correct as well because my initial intent was to do that, but it turned out to be a big blue mush instead.

So technically, Dan is correct twice.

As a result of his dual correctness, I feel obliged to offer him something more than a link. So here’s something better: two links. So please stop by dcrblogs.com and gain some wisdom on making your blog better. Here’s two recent posts I like:

Money for (Almost) Nothing
Mindful Monday: The Value of eBooks

Congrats, Dan.

Now that leaves me with the problem of everyone else. Since I suck this week, you all win, but everyone pretty much guessed the right thing anyway. So, in no particular order:

smarmoofus, dcr, CatSynth, Raven, Pamela, Jan, Rizza, Francine, Kelly, Michelle Gartner, Vixen, Chica and Bill (not Jill).

Thanks for commenting everyone! See you next week!

Every so often, that award-winning photo you had envisioned turns out to be a waste bin liner. You thought the frame captured what your mind saw, but apparently not. Other factors like equipment and lighting may cause problems with the final product as well, but this shouldn’t leave you discouraged. There is a way.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to salvage a bad photo in three easy steps, using Picasa2 photo editing software. A little crop, saturation and sharpening goes a long way. So before you delete those photos, watch this!

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About a month ago, I discussed a the possibility of bunch of new things coming to My GPS Camera Phone. Today, I am happy to present one of those big additions – video tutorials on photo editing.

Being a visual person, I find it difficult to learn about graphics software by just looking at a user guide or a text tutorial. While there are many good tutorials out there, I haven’t seen many video-based ones. In an attempt to fill that void and to bring the mysteries of photo editing to the “regular guy/girl,” I’ll be creating and offering these short tutorials.

Each video will only run around three minutes, so watching them won’t require a huge block of time. I’m hoping to pass on helpful photo editing tips and software use methods so anyone can understand them. While you can’t make a bad picture good, you can make a good picture better. I hope to be able to show you how.

On to the tutorial!

How-to Prepare a Photo for the Web (Quick and Dirty) run time – 3:30
Learn how to quickly crop an image, adjust the levels and punch up those colors in three easy steps. Based in Adobe Photoshop® CS (not CS2 like I say in the video).

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