By Nikki Trexel I was in North Carolina’s Outer Banks for ten days, a summer paradise …
By Nikki Trexel I was in North Carolina’s Outer Banks for ten days, a summer paradise for one Midwestern girl who’s never been to the ocean. Many photos were captured, such as A Sandy Stairway to Heaven, and the ocean was lapping at our ankles and The Shadows Ascend. But this, one of the first taken at the beach, immediately stuck out to me as having potential: And so you can compare them side by side, here’s the final product. / / The first thing I did when I opened the photo was crop a little extra space off the bottom and left-hand side. This gives the photo a more balanced composition. The sand shouldn’t be the first thing the eye lands on. I also rotated it one or two degrees counter-clockwise to even out the horizon line (Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary). These are very important steps and I recommend doing them first. (And if I hadn’t been trying to keep up polite conversation with the person showing me around, I might have even gotten it right when I took the photo.) Then I had a play in Curves (Ctrl+M or Image>Adjustments>Curves). This is a very powerful tool which, used appropriately and subtly, can create more “pop” and intensity in a bland photo. It can take a while to get the hang of, but for me, the best results are often obtained by creating two or three “pins” and dragging the line so it creates a kind of subtle S-curve like this: / / Here’s roughly how Curves works: the line represents darker tones towards the bottom and left, and lighter ones towards the top and right. So, for example, if you drag the top part of the line down, it’ll make the highlights darker; and if you drag it upwards, your bright spots will be ever brighter. Be very careful, though, not to blow out any highlights or over-darken the dark spaces. It’s easy to get carried away with the Curves tool and make your photo look pretty ridiculous. Next, I used the Replace Color tool (Image>Adjustments>Replace Color) to make my chairs a little brighter without oversaturating the blue sky. Here, you just use the dropper to select which color you’d like to alter, and make sure the “Fuzziness” slider on the Replace Color window is increased as much as possible without starting to apply to stuff you don’t want it to. Here it’s simple because there is only one pink and one green area in my photo. All I did was “grab” each color with the dropper, and slightly increase the saturation. (It might be a bug in my version of Photoshop, but you might have to close out the window, then open it again to start working on a new color.) Again, this is something you have to get the hang of, but after a while it becomes second nature. I also cloned out one or two swimmers in the distant water. Not much more than a dot or two of cloning was necessary – they were only large enough to be spots in my lovely blue water. The last, and most important thing, I did with this image was – I guess it’s pretty obvious – give it a nice sky. I kind of liked the simplicity of the plain blue sky in the original, but I wanted the image to be special. I was lucky enough to have a similar photo of the clouds, taken on the same beach but on another day. I chose it because the size, depth and lighting were mostly correct already. I had to slightly alter the color to make it match the “feel” of the original photo. Here is my new sky in its primitive form. My original sky is also a very simple one to replace. The only thing sticking into the sky area is my duo of beach chairs. (If it had been a more complicated horizon, I would have probably opted for a smooth blue sky.) My chosen method for this simple replacement was simply to Clone the new sky overtop of the other old one. (There are more complex and useful ways utilizing Layers but there is really no need for that now. Plus, I don’t know how to use those ways.) This method won’t work every time, so you’ll need to size up your options to see how you’re going to create your masterpiece. If the sky to be replaced is very simple, with not a lot of complications like trees or people or other things in front of it, then you are golden. Lastly, I did a little bit of final tweaking to the entire image to make everything feel right. That included a bit of dodging and burning in my clouds, a slight saturation increase overall, and a couple of tiny clone jobs to get rid of a few blades of grass apparently growing out of the ocean (courtesy of the foreground of my new sky). You’ll have to work with this on your own photo and see what looks best. Every photo is different, and every path from good to great is totally unique. Here is my final product again, which took me a little less than a half-hour from start to finish. / Rhapsody in Blue Thanks so much for reading!
Thanks, so much for featuring my work in the following groups: / *Firelight-...
Thanks, so much for featuring my work in the following groups: / Firelight was featured in Seashells and / Folds of Blue was featured in Globes, Spheres and Curves What an honor! Thanks! :D
/ Shiva / / Alabaster Coaster Pattern / Thanks to the group Globes, Spheres and Curves / for this great double feature…truly appreciated:)
Have today been featured in the Globes Spheres and Curves Group with Daisy: !http://images-2.redbubble.net/img/art/border:noborder/pro…
Have today been featured in the Globes Spheres and Curves Group with Daisy: And in the History Group with Old Blue: Many thanks to the moderators concerned in both groups.
What a wonderful Sunday surprise! “Whirling wizard” / !http://images-0.redbubble.net/img/art/backingcolor:white/product:greeting-card/...
What a wonderful Sunday surprise! “Whirling wizard” / / was featured in Globes, Spheres and Curves / Thank you so much to this outstanding group and it’s hosts for this great honour! I’m over the moon! Yaaaaaay! / Happy bubbling / Love and hugs / Carol xxxx
Just Curves / is featured in the group Globes, Spheres and Curves...
Just Curves / is featured in the group Globes, Spheres and Curves / Thanks to the group for this feature:) /
Spiraling Blues / is featured in “Globes, Sphere…
Spiraling Blues / is featured in Globes, Spheres and Curves / Thanks to the Group for this feature /
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