originally uploaded by steppingonlegos.
All of my pool pictures turn out awful. Its forced me out of auto mode because on my no-flash auto setting the pictures have grossly distorted color hues leaning heavily to the blue side and are all over the spectrum in exposure – either way under or overexposed.
An examples:
Too dark, too blue. Blah. It doesn’t help that we tend to swim after dinner when it is pretty much full shade back there, too dark for low ISO settings which mean that often my pictures are pretty grainy to boot.
Here’s the post-processed true-to-life version:
I can get it the way I want it post-processed, more or less. But I want it more true to life SOOC. I’ve played around with the exposure compensation, the shutter speed, aperture, the white balance, etc. The one thing I haven’t done is try to manually set the hue adjustment to compensate. That seems a little drastic though.
Any ideas? Opinions?
Well I intended to go out into rural Texas (which frankly is ALL of Texas pretty much) and find me some awesome barns to shoot but post-vacation business got the best of me so here I am posting what I already had. I really do love this assignment and hope to revisit it in the near future on my own because I only just recently, within the last year or so, started to see value in shooting things that are old and juxtaposing them with things that are new. I never understood the appeal, now I do. But my eye rarely goes to those things and I rarely remember to look for those shots. I’m getting better but verrrry slowly. So this is all I’ve got, from my recent Mother’s Day picture series.
This is when I first moved into our new house. I loved all the rusty metal and weathered wood contrasting with our “new” yard and home:
Bonus: this is aged via post-processed. Usually I’m not a fan of the sepia and the post-process aging but I had this photo I loved that was otherwise too grainy to use. I really like how this one turned out 
See many more aged photos over at the Land of K.A.’s Theme Thursday!
Last night I was playing around with Photoshop and tried a new technique for taking an otherwise dull photo and making the eyes pop.
1) use the mask tool to highlight just the eyes. I always choose everything inside the dark circle around the iris. I don’t include the dark circle itself.
2) demask to everything but the eyes are selected and then adjust saturation downward so that the picture is slightly desaturated.
3) select the inverse so that now the eyes are the only thing selected. Increase the brightness and contrast appropriately so the eyes really pop. The contrast between the desaturated picture and the brightly contrasted eyes will do amazing things to your photo!
I’m still trying to play around with this technique, I think this photo makes him look a little pale. But it’s a fun technique anyway.
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© 2008 by Nicki Bradley