“Sarah’s photos always look so good” says my tweenage little sister Anna.” Why don’t my photos look like that?” Her mom tells her that my photos don’t always come out of the camera looking that way. That I have to put a lot of work into them using computer programs. My step-mom is right. Most of my photos do get a little tweak in lightroom or photoshop, with some having more work than others. In this post, I’ll show you one of those where I had some fun and did more than average “post processing”.
My goal is to get photos as close to how I want them as possible “in camera”, but as the song goes…. you can’t always get what you want. At least, not without the power of Photoshop and more recently Lightroom.
You Cant Always Get What You Want
Sometimes there are limitations due to equipment, lighting conditions, physical impediments, etc to taking the perfect shot (step 1 & 3).
In addition, the average photo taken with a digital camera will need a little bit of color adjustment. In my experience, most photographers with access to software will use it to slightly adjust the color and white balance on their photos to remove the slight gray tinge found in many digital camera photos (step 2).
While we often seek to have our photos accurately record the moment, I often like to push my photos from pure accuracy to slightly fantastical, magical or surreal. (Step 4-5)
Challenge 1: getting close enough
In the following example, I had an equipment based limitation. I wanted to take a closeup photo of a gorgeous dogwood bud that had just burst open. The lens I happened to have on my camera at the time takes beautiful crisp photos but it does not have the ability to zoom in. If you want to be closer or further away from the thing you are photographing, you have to do it with your own two feet. It also does not have the ability to take really close “macro” photos. It has something called a minimum focusing distance which means that if I get to close to the thing I want to photograph, it can’t focus.
So, I was forced to take the photo as close to the dogwood bud as I could get and still be able to focus. Here is the photo as it looked straight out of the camera (SOOC). At this point, the photo is nothing special. You might even say it is mediocre. The dogwood bud is a bit too far away and the colors are a little bit drab.
I quickly adjusted the color a little bit to start bringing out the sparkle. In adjusting the colors, I wanted to emphasize the greens and bring out the golden light of the setting sun.
Next I cropped the photo to get in nice and close to the interesting green buds. This brought me closer to the photo I had in my minds eye, but was prevented from taking in-camera due to the focusing limitations of the lens I was using.
Don’t you just love the light green petals with the pinkish tips and the textural darker green centers.
Challenge 2: Take a pretty “real life” photo and sprinkle in some magical
You may have noticed in the photo above that I not only cropped the photo, but I also took some artistic liberty and moved the bud on the right a little bit closer to it’s neighbors. My intention here is to improve the composition by stretching, or actually squishing, the truth just a little bit.
Adding Texture
I could have stopped at this point. I think it is a lovely photo that admirably captures the beauty of the budding dogwood tree that I enjoy every spring in my front yard. But I decided to give myself a little photoshop challenge. There are some amazing photographic artists who are using interesting textures to enhance their photographs, merging photographic truth with something more artistic like a painting or a collage. I’ve been wanting to give it a try myself.
This is my first real attempt at using textures to add a little magic to a photo. I wont go into the details of how its done, but the following was create by layering on 3 different photographs of interesting textures (thanks to SkeletalMess for the textures) and blending them together until I liked what I saw.
Pushing The Envelope
Since I can’t seem to leave well enough alone, I added some more contrast and blacks for added drama. This one certainly crosses the line from enhanced reality to fantastical surreal. Too much? I cant decide…
What do you think?
Do you prefer step 3 with it’s pretty realism? Step 4 with a little textural enhancement? Or the dark and dramatic step 5?
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