Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Messing with PhotoShop

Original

Above is a picture of impatiens and sedum in our yard that I took on October 13. (There is a close-up of the impatiens bud on my Project 365 blog.) I decided to experiment with Photoshop enhancements for adjusting color. (I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 that came with either my scanner or camera). For the first four photos below I used the Enhance -> Adjust Color -> Hue/Saturation feature. For the fifth, I used the Enhance -> Adjust Brightness/Contrast-> Adjust Levels feature. The enhancements were made to copies of the original photo. Only one enhancement was done to each photo below. All photos were resized to 800 pixels wide and saved in a JPG file of about 100KB.

Adjusting the hue results in shifting the colors around the color wheel. Saturation adjusts the purity of the color. The samples below were done to demonstrate the range that is possible. Fine-tuning a photo can bring it to the color that the eye saw, but the camera could not exactly duplicate. Adjusting levels changes the intensity of the shadows and highlights. Large adjustments can make unusual and striking photos of every day objects.

Hue set to -90 (red to blue shift)

Hue set to -180 (red to green shift)

Hue set to +90 (red to yellow shift)

Saturation set to +100

Levels RGB: Input set to 50, .30 235 Output 0 255 (not changed)

2 comments:

Rune Eide said...

Looks like you have been having lots of fun - that's the spirit!

I'll have to try playing around with those settings a bit more.

Michele said...

Neat... very interesting to see what that program can do!!