Sky Watch - PhotoShopped skies

I use Photoshop Elements 2.0 for editing my photos. Most of my posts are resized to 900 or 600 pixels and saved with low resolution. I some times crop, adjust color, contrast, brightness, etc when I believe the straight out of the camera was not exactly what I saw. I do at times go beyond the simple edits to change the visual effects of the original image. The header "Horizontal clouds" posted on January 26 is an example. The above image was taken on January 24 has only been resized. The image below was cropped and I applied auto color enhancement. PhotosShop's algorithm determined that the image should be grayer than my Nikon. I used the Enhance->Adjust Color->Hue & Saturation features to get the colors in the header.

I also like the saturated blue shift below.

More PhotoShop - Wind chimes

Filter = > Distort => Twirl

I went out back this afternoon to take a few shots of the sky. Coming back in, I took one shot of the wind chime hanging near the door. The rather drab day led me to spice up the naturally monochrome image with PhotoShop elements. First, I did a twirl (above), then glowing edges (below). And finally I added a blue neon glow. The original photo is at the end.

Filter = > Stylize => Glowing edges

Filter = > Artistic => Neon glow

Original image

More experiments with Photoshop

I posted the original of this photo on my daily blog. Then I decided it would be an interesting scene to experiment with. Above is the Filter => Artistic => Palette knife effect. Below I did some free hand distortion with the Filter => Distort => Liquify effect. The third picture is Filter => Sketch => Bas Relief effect. PhotoShop Elements has almost 100 different filter effects, with variable parameters for many of them. The trick will be to learn which effects work best with various subjects.

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)