Thu 1 May 2008
Wayne reconsiders some of his recent photographs and explores how they look using a favored technique of his.
There are so many options in what we do with our images. I know I have about a half-dozen techniques I use commonly on images and then more that I use infrequently.
When I return from a photo shoot there is a lot of immediate enthusiasm to download the images onto the computer, have a look at them and, picking out the highlight images, do some processing to get them into a finished state. This processing might just be a little Levels or Curves adjustment, depending on the lighting or subject matter, or it may be much more extensive.
Whatever it is you do to them, I have found that one of the things I have to work to overcome is the assumption that my first choice is the best. I believe the psychology works that once you start to see an image heading in a particular direction it becomes much harder to see the other possibilities. You need to work against this thinking quite hard and re-evaluate images to explore other directions of development.
Recently I wrote about this in a photography tip.
So as an exercise I took some images I have recently taken and processed simply:
http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=1316
http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=1293
and took them in a different direction. You see this in the images in this article.
What I did was to apply a modified form of the process I discussed in the five article Photoshop series on blur:
http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=874
http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=875
http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=877
http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=878
http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=879
and added a final stage of a Levels adjustment layer above all the others to restore the white in the image (multiply blending mode tends to darken the whole image, even the highlights).
I also have in mind taking some of these images in yet another direction, and so will do so and then consider which direction works best for each image. For me it is an exercise in more fully exploring an image and what I can do with it.
I’d encourage you to do the same.
