Uploading

Ok, later on today I am going to upload my four chosen pictures to BigStock Photo, once I have done that I will post the Labels etc that I have used.

forth picture

the forth picture that I have chosen is one that I took from the railway crossing (Fig 1), I wasn't quite sure what to do with this picture, as there is a lot going on in this picture, I also considered another picture that I had taken (Fig 2), but I had no idea how I could enhance it, and i had no idea what use it would be to anyone who downloaded t, so I chose the other picture as it could be used for a background or something.

(Fig 1)


(Fig 2)

So, to enhance the picture, I first altered the colour balance by adding a little more red, green and blue, to bring out the colours within the picture, (theres a lot!)

I then added brightness, because the areas in the shade in the picture, would have been pretty dark without.

I then had trouble deciding what to do next within the picture. I wanted to get the sense of distance down the tracks, so I hope that's what have done.

So, what I did was add a ripple effect to the picture. I adjusted the radius so that it wasn't too big or too small. I then altered the position on the picture where the ripple was centered from, I centered it so tat it is appearing from where the tracks disappear, hopefully this gives the impression of their being more distance to the image.



although here i've uploaded the picture as a jpeg, the file on the CD and bigstock, will be a tif.

Third Picture

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I feel that this picture is nice anyway, but I enhanced it anyway.



Basically I just changed the cour balance b adding abit more red, to bring out the colour of the signal itself, and I also added more blue to help enhance the colour of the sky. I also added brightness to the picture, and a small amount of contrast.

I then cropped the picture closer to the signal, to get rid of the tree on the right of the picture, and also the what I think is a smudge in the top right.



The file format for this picture is .png, as this format is good for blocks of colours, the sky in this picture.

Second picture

For this picture, I only took 2 as i wanted to catch the crossing gates were down. Although having only a simple modification, it's rather effective. I chose the photo that was at the best angle as they were both clear. i didn't adjust the colouring and brightness, as i felt these were both OK.



so what i did with this picture is gave it a depth of field effect. as i said before this is pretty simple, but it gives quite a dramatic effect. the first thing that i did was select the crossing lights , using various selection tools, Marquee, Magic wand, Lasso tool. once i had carefully selected the the lights, I inversed the selection, so that everything else BUT the lights were selected. Once this, I then chose the Gaussian blur. this gave the picture a nice effect, but there was a sharp line between the blurred background and the lights. so to fix this, I kept the selection and decided to use the feather option.



although the picture hosted on here is a png, the file i put on the CD will be a .tif. this is because it is a lossless file format, and good for photos with many colours, i thought this would help show the colors in the blurriness.

I forgot to mention the previous pictures file format in my previous post. it is a .png, because the picture is mostly black and white, but has many different shades, and some other colours too. so i decided to go with .png as this can handle more colours than a .gif.

My First Picture

My first picture is of a train bogie, (it's wheels). i had taking various pictures from a similar angle, but they all varied in brightness and blurriness. So I chose the best one, and decided how to enhance it. I decided I wouldn't do much but knew I had to crop the image as a logo was visible on the side of the train. i also altered the colour, to make it the best i could.



I first lowed the brightness to the original image, (above), as there was a burst of sunlight on the left hand side. After this, i altered the colour balance of this image, I added more red, to bring out the rust on the tracks and the bogie, I took out some green and therefore added magenta, this brought out the gravel more. And finally added a very small amount of yellow, as I felt this added a little bit more light to the darker areas.
I then added some saturation and lightness to the image, to further add brightness to the darker parts of the image.

shown on the image below.



I then cropped and sharpened to finish the image.

more photoshopping

in the last workshop, we learned about using layer masks, to merge images together. the task was to merge three images together to create a totally different image. The basics of what i did included selecting bits of the image that were appropriate, so i could copy them, then paste it as a new layer , I then created a new layer mask, to marge the layers together. anything that i painted black on the top layer would 'disappear'. i chose a medium sized faded brush and merged round the edges. I was very pleased with the end result, as it looked just like the example. After I had finished the image i used some tools that I had learned in the previous workshop to ad some effects.

Learning Photoshop

Hi, on Tuesday the 2nd, we learned the basics of photoshop, for some of us, like me, photoshop is a new program although I have used The Gimp and Paint Shop Pro before, so I had some idea of which button did what, we got shown the basic features such as the marquee select tool and the move tool, and we then learnt some more advanced features like blurring and repairing images.

We were then told to choose one of the images that needed repairing, and fix it as best as we could. I chose this image:


I thought to myself this would be a challenge, so i chose it!

After using the clone tool, and the healing brush it was looking pretty good:


I then decided it would look better the right way up, so I roted it using the transform tool, then selected it using the marquee tool, copied and pasted it to a new image file: