Individual Photos included in Photo Story

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Photo Story: Winter Wildlife in Vermont

Winter Wildlife in Vermont

1. Sunrise scene
a. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 40
b. Watermark
c. I didn’t want to change too much of this photo in order to preserve its natural beauty.
2. Deer eating under gazebo
a. Color Balance: Color Levels 50 50 50
b. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 20 Contrast 0
c. Watermark
3. Deer just starting to cross road
a. Crop Tool: I cropped this image in order to get rid of a lot of the background. The deer wasn’t in the center of the image so by cropping I think I helped the deer to be center stage. In the original photo the deer was also hard to see because of its colors matching the background so well. So I think this helped a lot!
b. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 35 Contrast 70
c. Filter: “Crosshatch” Stroke Length 9, Sharpness 6, Strength 1
d. Watermark
4. Deer in the middle of road
a. Crop Tool: Same explanation as the previous photo.
b. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 35 Contrast 70
c. Filter: “Crosshatch” Stroke Length 9, Sharpness 6, Strength 1
d. Watermark
5. Deer across the road
a. Crop Tool: Same explanation as the previous photo.
b. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness -10 Contrast 60
c. Filter: “Crosshatch” Stroke Length 9, Sharpness 6, Strength 1
d. Watermark
e. In each photo of the deer crossing the road; I tried to keep my changes relatively the same so each one would flow being next to each other in the slideshow. It didn’t flow well at all when I made completely different changes to each.
6. Individual light brown horse
a. Clone Tool: Used to get rid of an orange ribbon on the barbed wire fence. The color was very distracting.
b. Brush Tool: Painted in the section of the fence that I lost when I got rid of the orange ribbon.
c. Blur Tool: Blurred the area surrounding the horse just a little bit to make him stand out more.
d. Burn Tool: Brush 65px 100% hardness Range- Highlights Exposure- 30% Also used this around the horse just a little bit to make him stand out a little better.
e. Filter: “Smudge Stick” Didn’t adjust anything because it gave the horse a great glow!
f. Watermark
7. Individual dark brown horse
a. Dodge Tool: Lightened up the horse’s face just a little bit.
b. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 40 Contrast 30
c. Clone Tool: Used to get rid of an orange ribbon that was on the barbed wire fence.
d. Brush Tool: Painted in a section of the fence that I got rid of when removing the orange ribbon.
e. Watermark
8. Both horses, rubbing in snow
a. Blur Tool: Used around the snow the light brown horse is kicking up. And also around the brown horse to try and put more focus on the light brown horse.
b. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 30 Contrast 40
c. Watermark
9. Beaver Dam
a. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 50 Contrast 50
b. Filter: “Mosaic” Tile Size 12, Grout Width 3, Lighten Grout 9
c. Watermark
10. Owl in tree
a. Smudge Tool: Mode- Normal Strength- 50% Brush Size- 100px Hardness- 100
b. Watermark
11. Sunset scene
a. Brightness/Contrast: Brightness 50- This brightened up the beautiful sky colors.
b. Watermark
c. I didn’t want to change too much of this photo in order to preserve its natural beauty.

Portraits

Portrait #1: In this portrait I tried using props. This photo is very simple. She is sitting with her "special" blankie behind her and "Bobby" bear in between her legs. I don't think that these props take away from Cassidy as the subject, but maybe they don't stand out quite enough.

Portrait #2: In this portrait I wanted to play with facial expressions. I decided to take a close up of Cassidy's face. I used the macro setting on my camera. I tried getting her to make an interesting face!

Portrait #3: I tried altering the perspective of this portrait and played with facial expressions as well. I decided to take another close up of Cassidy using the macro setting, but I also changed the perspective a bit. I was positioned above Cassidy looking down on her. Like the tutorials say, this can give a photo the WOW factor!

Portrait #4: In this portrait, I wanted to play with backgrounds and camera angles. I put a comforter on the floor to give the photo a neat looking background. Then I told Cassidy to play around! As soon as I saw this shot I angled my camera a bit and took it! I think it looks neat angled in this way!

After I read through the portrait tutorials, I decided on a few different ideas that I wanted to try. The ones that stood out to me was different angles, backgrounds, facial expressions, props and perspectives. I really enjoyed taking these photos and experimenting with different ideas. My portrait shoot went really great and I didn't end up running into any problems. Now if Cassidy hadn't been so well behaved then it could've been a bit difficult, but she was great, very patient. I look forward to trying more of the ideas I learned from the tutorials in future.

Painting

This is the photo I decided to use. It's my daughter Cassidy's school pic from last fall! I decided to color her shirt!

I know this isn't to big of a change, but I really tried to make it look nice so I didn't want to alter it to much. This is one thing I am noticing with everything we are learning on Photoshop and that is sometimes its not good to completely alter something. Try and keep the photo the same as much as possible. Personally I think things look more life-like like this.

To turn Cassidy's shirt a slight green I decided to use the "color replacement tool." I decided to set the color from the stems on the mums. I chose a brush that was fairly big because the shirt in the photo is pretty big. Then I was careful to stay within the lines!

Text

I was so very happy that we had an assignment where I could use this photo! This owl around noon everyday for the past few days has been on the edge of the woodline out back of my house. Well I had gone out hoping to catch a shot of him because he's just beautiful and finally yesterday I did it!!! And I got a pretty good close up too! I'm hoping he'll sick around a bit longer and maybe I would be able to get a shot of him flying because his wing span is long!

So I just decided to do a watermark with a copyright symbol and my name on this photo. I have been wondering how to do this for a while so it was great to learn. I am sorry if it isn't that visible from my blog. It looks a lot bigger in Photoshop and I noticed if you click on the photo it will enlarge as well.

To do this watermark I first decided to place it in the middle of the photo. Normally I would probably do it in the right or left hand bottom corner but I wanted it to be nice and visible for the class to see. I typed in the copyright symbol then my name. Then I chose a color for the text that was pretty close to the colors in the photo. I then chose to play with the "blending options" for this. I lowered the opacity some because I wanted to lighten up the watermark so it didn't take away from the photo, but almost looks like it goes with it.

Cloning

This is the image I chose to use. I decided to use this one because of the colors and what I wanted to hide. I found that its not good to try and clone to hide something that is large or that doesn't have a pretty plain background!

So I decided to cover up the two sheep in this photo. I thought it came out pretty good! I really like the cloning stamp, but I did notice that you can't use it on everything. If you are trying to hide something that is not to big it will work great. Or if you are trying to hide something big, but the area you are going to clone is a pretty solid color then it will work. But it really all depends on the photo and the background!

I know we were only supposed to do one photo but I wanted to upload this one that I did too! This photo I think sort of shows what I was talking about with above photo I cloned.

In this photo I took out the horse's head that was on the right side of the photo. I think it came out "alright." But I don't think this is the greatest photo to be cloning because of what the background is. I think it was hard cloning the trees. I originally tried to get rid of the white horse also, but this horse was way to big to clone over using the trees because you could completely tell that the photo was cloned! But I thought this would just be a good example!

Filters

This is the first photo that I decided to use! It is a picture of a horse that I always see down the road from my house!

I love filters! They are amazing! In this photo I used the charcoal and chalk filter. I adjusted the charcoal area a bit to darken things up and to make the photo more sharp looking. I didn't really adjust anything else because it looked perfect this way and when I did experiment a bit I noticed it made things look a bit distorted!

This is the second photo I decided to use! It's a photo of my dog Bruno!

In this photo the first thing I decided to do was some cropping. I wanted to photo to be strictly of Bruno and not so much of the porch or the swimming pool you can see a little towards the right of the photo. The filter I used here was photocopy. I did adjust the detail and darkness of the photo quite a bit. Originally the photo seemed a bit light when I first applied the filter. So I decided to darken it up quite a bit. The detail I also adjusted a bit higer to give the photo more definition.

I really enjoyed using these filters this week! I must've tried every filter just to see they way they would change my photos. Its amazing what Photoshop can do! As you can see I really the black/white filters. I just think black/white photos give lots of character!