I blame the recent too-early-cause-it-ain’t-officially-winter-yet flurry action for the delay in posting this next segment. It made for great pictures, but not so great motivation to sit down and write. Also, I had too much hot chocolate yesterday.
But last night, I re-arranged my computer room to put my two machines closer to each other. And this morning, I hooked up my external drive to my CS3 machine (because that’s all I’m using it for) so I could work on a few of my older images. Particularly this one:
That’s a picture of the river that flows through our town. I was so disappointed with the photo because the colors seemed flat and lifeless. Not at all anything like the vibrant yellows and golds and reds and oranges that I remembered. I mean, I wouldn’t have made my son stop on the side of a winding road so I could walk out in the cold drizzling rain while crazy-fast drivers more than twice almost made me roadkill if the view hadn’t been that spectacular.
Whew. That was a long sentence.
Fortunately for me, I felt like I learned enough to give this a whack at Photoshop.
What I learned at the CS3 Power Tour:
4. While older versions of Photoshop are definitely robust enough to fix your JPG mistakes, doing it in Camera Raw is so much easier and faster.
It took literally minutes and only a few clicks. I loaded up the photo and fixed the exposure first. Then I bumped up the midtones, increased blacks, and added a bit of fill light. Then I threw it back to Photoshop for final sharpening. With a little cropping to finish it off, here’s the before and after:
It may seem oversaturated to you, but I’m telling you, that right there matches exactly what I remember seeing that afternoon. And now I can finally feel like I didn’t waste my time standing on that bridge with cold hands that afternoon. Because you know that the afternoon means high school kids are on the road with their new licenses, and the stuff they were shouting at me while I was walking around scouting for better vantage points could fill another post.
Man, what is it with me a long sentences today?
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Addendum: Just for kicks, and because it looks pretty, here’s a version done by Sherweld using the Orton Effect.
Dreamy, yes? Makes me think of sitting by a fireplace, curled up with a good book or just looking out the window admiring nature. Aaaah. I think I need to go get some hot chocolate now to complete the image. Excuse me while I overload myself with yet more sugar and cocoa.
I swear even the water looks sharper and crystal clear in the 2nd shot. Very cool. It seems photoshop took away the drizzle of the day.
Well that final result makes it worth all of the trouble. What a testament to the powers of Photoshop. The “after” shot has such depth and vibrancy. I like the ortonized version also, but for some reason I think I prefer the crispness of the reflections in the water on the non-ortonized version.
Thanks! I’m glad when Photoshop can help me recapture the exact image I saw when my camera (and my skills) won’t cooperate. Despite the slight drizzle as I was walking down the road, it cleared up when I got to the bridge. The water was so clear that the reflections were nice and sharp, and that’s what I really wanted to recreate.
The sky’s blown out, though. Sherweld sent me a link on how to repair blown out skies (his ortonized version has a tinge of blue up there). I’ll report back if I have any measure of success.
Now if you could clone Cate Blanchet in her LOTR costume of to the right on the banks I’d swear the ortenized was of some childrens books about elves and fairies and very skinny talented actress.
Shrew, if I could do that, I’d clone very skinny talented actresses onto my self-portraits. :)
I’ve been following (belated, of course) your SK reviews with much interest, and have a question for you…
HOW do you open a jpg in the RAW editor? I shoot all RAW now, but would love to tidy up some of my old work, and the RAW editor is so nice for this type of thing!
Oh, and you make me chuckle :) in a very joyful, loving way! Thanks for your posts!
Hi Andrea! Nice of you to visit.
Okay, business first. I believe you need CS3 to open the jpg as RAW (I don’t think CS2 had that capability). It’s really simple. Just click on File, then Open As, and in the dialog box that comes up, click on the “Open As” option below the File name box, and pick Camera Raw. Then open your file, and it will open it using Camera Raw.
Another thing you can do is go to Edit, then Preferences. Under File Handling, check the box that says Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG files (it’s under the File Compatibility section). Then, every time you open a jpg file in CS3, it will open in Camera Raw.
Hope that helps. Now, it’s my turn to ask a question. SK? What’s SK? I’m thinking … Sloppy Kitchen? Sweaty Kangaroo? Stale Knish?
And why am I hungry all of a sudden?