I purchased my camera and started this blog in earnest in July last year. A year seems to have flown past and hopefully I've shown a lot of what I've learned about photography. I know I've hosted a lot of images and had a surprising number of visitors to this blog.

In order to celebrate a year of blogdom and camera fun I thought it might be nice to have a challenge.

The aim of the game is to take the following image and make it 'better' using any post processing tools you have at your disposal. Be it Photoshop or Picasa, GIMP or Paint Shop Pro, even the online tools I discussed here are allowed. When you've finished, email me the image and I'll host all the finished work in a gallery for review. I'll even arrange an independent judge to pick the best one.

To make it interesting, and as a thank-you to all the people who've visited over the last year, I'll donate a £10 Amazon voucher to the winner. I know it's not going to change your life, but hey...

Closing date for entries will be the 30th June and I'll post the gallery and winner as soon after that as feasible.

So! What are you waiting for?

 

...oh, yeah, the image...

 

The full size jpeg can be found here.

The full size raw (.dng) file can be found here.

(You might want to use right-click then save link as...)

 

 

The small print.

I'm not sure if we need much in the way of formalised rules here, but just in case...

1. No more than 2 entries per person. The competition is open to everyone

2. All entries should have a valid email address associated with them

3. Submitted pictures should be composed of the above image (no substituting my digger picture for some random blonde, Jon)

4. The judges decision is final

5. The £10 Amazon voucher can be made available in different currencies as required

EDIT (21/05/08)

The link for the .dng file should now work.

When is enough enough?

I never know when to finish with the post processing of an image and when to just call it a day step back from Photoshop or GIMP or any of the other tools I've used recently.

Here's a good example.

(F/4, 1/200sec, 70mm, ISO-400, 03/05/2008)

 

This shot has been pushed through the Photoshop mill a reasonable amount. Curves, a slight cooling filter and a few other tweaks have been applied to make give it a bit more life. The original isn't worth posting, it's very dull and lifeless (to be honest I wouldn't even have looked twice at this if it wasn't for my weird emotional connection to this boat).

Now, I quite liked this shot and figured it was as close to OK as I could make it...

 

Then I loaded it into Dynamic Photo-HDR (the tool I use for all my HDR shots) and ended up with this.

 

So, here's the thing. Was it a step too far?

 

I like the water, I like the colours. I know it breaks my own opinion on HDR needing to look 'real' to look 'good', but apart from that I'm damned if I can decide which I prefer.

 

Maybe they both suck.

Last year sometime I mentioned Chromasia as a good place to see amazing photographs.

Well, around the time I bought my camera, the folks at Chromasia started offering some photoshop tutorials for sale. I've been debating buying for a while and last week cracked.

They're very comprehensive and easy to follow. The results speak for themselves when you look at their before and after pictures. Hopefully, some of the things I've been learning have started to appear in some of the recent pictures I've posted as well (certainly the foot steps picture was haveily influenced by some of the tutorials).

You can buy individual tutorials for about a fiver, annual subscriptions and lifetime subscriptions are £25 and £75 at the moment. To my mind they're well worth a small investment.

There's also a sample one available which looks at Tonal Range and Curves

You can find the tutorials below or by using the handy link I've added on the right menu.

Photoshop tutorials by chromasia

Another HDR shot from a week or so ago.

Nothing major to say about this, except that trying to keep orange life rings from glowing when making an HDR image is a pain in the...

Sorry, normal service will resume when it's not so hot or when I stop being basted in my own juices.

In the meantime, I went to the zoo.

 

(F/5.6, 1/200sec, 200mm, ISO-100, 10/05/2008)

Just a crop to make it portrait not landscape and a tweak to curves - it's too nice a day to be sitting in here doing anything else...

I'm not sure exactly what they're for - I'd suspect Shrimp, but since that season isn't until August, they may be for Green Crab or some other local shellfish. Either way, I liked the semi-uniformity of the two stacks.

 

I thought I'd also post the unedited picture (below). I think this might be a case of a photoshop too far, but I'm trying to find the vibrancy and richness other people manage, both through the lens and in the post edit stage. It's worth looking at photographs by Oswegan, Dynamic Perceptions, etc for good examples of rich, powerful images which don't feel over processed (if they've been post processed at all - I honestly have no way of telling!)

 

While retracing my steps on the beach that night, I came across this.

(F/8, 3.2sec, 22mm, ISO-100, 03/05/08)

 

Now, only one of those sets belonged to me. So, who exactly followed me out?

(Yes Dermot, I know it's very dark - I like dark!)

The settings quoted above are a little misleading. I did a reasonable amount of photoshoping on this, specifically I used sharpen masks and some curve changes to push intensify the colours. Interestingly, I was playing with the application mode for the layers - I'd tended to leave it on normal in the past.This picture makes use of the multiply mode, merging two duplicate layers and (I guess) multiplying the colours together for a result. The "soft light" option also seemed interesting, but I decided I preferred this more sinister version. A heavy crop to change the image from landscape to portrait finished it off and got rid of the empty spaces down each flank.

I'd kind of stopped post processing outside of Lightroom and forays into HDRville over the last few weeks, but I picked up some fantastic tutorials on photoshop today and they've got me all inspired again. I'll post some details about them later.

I came across a couple of different online image editors recently, specifically Photoshop Express and Flauntr.

Both work via a web interface and seek to provide a selection of simple tools for image manipulation and management. Now, before I go any further – replacements for GIMP/Elements/CS3 they aren’t, but they maybe fill a niche in the whole web portfolio sphere by allowing some tweaks here and there. 

Essentially both sites offer free registration and a certain amount of free web space (2GB for Photoshop, but no obvious limit mentioned for Flauntr) to host pictures for editing. Both allow image uploading from hard drive as well as imports from a range of photo hosting sites (including flickr in Flauntr’s case and photobucket in Photoshops). Finally both offer the ability to save your pictures back to your hard drive. It's worth noting at this point Photoshop Express is restricted the the United States only, but there was nothing stopping me creating an account and pretending to live there (I'm a bad boy...)

So far they’re both pretty similar.
 

Photoshop Express




Flauntr

 

They’re both reasonably well equipped with a standard set of tools (crop, rotation, resize) as well as with some more advanced stuff like sharpening and highlights etc.

What sets them apart?

 

Well, based on a lunchtimes play, I’d say that Photoshop Express is the easier product to use. The majority of features are on the left hand side of the page and usually have handy previews above the image you’re editing to show you what’s possible with the tool selected.

Express also offers some nice features, like the colour pop tool above which reduces the image to black/white and your chosen colour and what appears to be the clone/repair tool from it’s big brothers under the guise of a touchup button.

Photoshop Express - Pop colour Tool

Flauntr approaches the usability question from a slightly different angle, making use of a set of tabs to offer different functionality in sensibly clustered blocks. The downside of this is that unless you know what you’re looking for you have to spend a lot of time exploring to see what’s possible. I’d suspect once you know what you’re doing it will all be so much faster, but I could see this putting a new player off.

Flauntr also provides a pretty little tool called PicasR which allows you to blend your photograph with the colour tones from some old masters paintings resulting in some lovely effects. Here's a few samples based on this picture.
 

Flauntr - Carnlough with Beachside Colours
using



Flauntr - Carnlough With Sunsetsea Colours
using
 

What sets Flauntr apart though, and what makes me think it’ll be used by the web generation it’s aimed at is the addition of a couple of simple tabs for social networking and mobile sites. Using these it’s painless to take your photograph and sculpt it into something to use as your logo/screen saver on LiveJournal/Bebo/WhereEverTheKidsPlayNow

So, what do I think?

Well, I reckon if you’re into the infernal complexities of CS3 then this isn’t for you. However, if you enjoy playing with images or if you want to be able to make small tweaks to existing pictures quickly without needing to get too complicated then these are definitely appealing. If I had to pick one, right now it would be Flauntr – in a world where it takes years to get to grips with CS3, allowing 10 more minutes to learn Flauntr over Express is not much of an ask.

 

(Since the web is immortal, it’s worth noting that Photoshop Express was in Beta on build version 448357 and Flauntr was in Alpha with no obvious build number).