Showing posts with label photoshop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photoshop. Show all posts

January 19, 2011

This week I learned...

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 


This week I learned about masking in Photoshop and I experimented by merging two photos into one.  I took this picture of my husbands tea...
which showed the steam rising off of it.  And then I took this picture of the beautiful tea bag he used to make this tea...but I lost the steam!

And I didn't realize it until I got the images on the computer.  So I decided to learn to merge the two and I watched some tutorials on masking (I can't remember where they were or I would post them for you) and did some color correcting and the final result was this:
 

January 17, 2011

Photo Sphere

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 


I'm having a lot of fun reading other photographers' blogs.  I stumbled upon this post from Ashley Sisk and just had to try out her tutorial.  Here's how it works. You start with a photograph of a landscape. I didn't really have a landscape so I chose an outdoor scene of some trees at my parents house that I love.
Then, according to her tutorial you need to crop the image so that the width of the photo is twice the height.  It should look something like this:
 Next, I followed her instructions to distort the photo into a square (make sure you don't constrain the proportions).
This is all seeming very strange so far, I know, but just bear with me.  It gets really cool in the end.  So once you have your distorted square image, you need to rotate it 180 degrees (so it's upside down).  After that, you go to Filter--> Distort--> Polar Coordinates (make sure it's set to 100%) and you'll end up with something like this:
Then you'll just need to do some playing in photoshop to come up with a nice final result. I used the patch tool and the clone stamp to get rid of the divide line, rotated the image until I liked the orientation, and did a lit bit of color editing and this is my final result.  I think it's beautiful.  It reminds me of an ornament made of flowers.
Let's see you try it.  Give it a shot and leave a comment back with a permalink to your post.  Happy editing and thanks Ashley for the inspiration.

January 15, 2011

This week I learned...

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 

a lot!  I learned that taking the photos is only the first step to becoming a great photographer.  The second step is knowing how to edit your photos...I'm not talking about airbrushing skin, or changing eye color or hair color or merging two photos into one, I'm talking simple color and light edits.  It's SO much fun to see your photo transform before your eyes but it is also time consuming and difficult.  Here's a before and after to demonstrate my learnings this week: