Photo Challenge Tuesday: Into The Light.

Several posts back, I guess a few hundred, I said that editing a photo was killing a good shot. I also said that if you weren’t able to get the composition right, the photo wasn’t worth saving or showing. Oh, I was so wrong…

Since I know Picnik (now www.picmonkey.com) I’ve been editing images on an almost daily basis. And I like it. I even like that much, that I bought Photoshop Elements 10 and Machinery HDR to edit images in different ways and styles. I even got several books and magazines to take tips from. And they work.

Below you will find my entry for this weeks Photo Challenge Tuesday: Into The Light.  The first one is the edited version from the image is on the bottom of this post. And maybe you like it, and maybe you don’t. But I sure do. Everytime I get a picture, I always end up with a more artistic version.

I did several things with this picture. First of all, I loaded the photo in Machinery HDR and applied a “Landscap” hdr tool. That’s all I did with Machinery HDR.  After saving, I uploaded it to www.picmonkey.com. I cropped it to get rid of the tree in the top left and I tried to get rid of the weird white wash. But I wasn’t able to. The contrast slider was causing to much noise and the sharpening tool also did to much damage. So instead of causing to much noise (and let’s be honnest, it’s allready noisy because I dont shoot raw but just simple jpeg) I tried to use other tools. First, I used the “Teeth Withing” tool and used it on the complete image. It made the weird white wash go away, but I wasn’t sure how to keep on going. So instead of trying to keep the original and make it better, I started searching the filters. I applied the “Boost” filter, and after that the “Cross Process” filter. But for some reason, that wasn’t working. So I reversed and applied them seperately and less intense and also in different order. The last thing I did was applying the “Focal Zoom” filter. The preset was way to much, so I turned it down to almost 10 percent. And this is the result.

• Aperture: ƒ/7.6
• Camera: COOLPIX S9100
• Focal length: 5.9mm
• ISO: 160
• Shutter speed: 1/2000s