SNOW & SOOC

Seriously?

This post was going to be about Photoshop-I've been playing and learning-but I must mention the weather as well. Pretty much every photograph you see published, whether art or print, has been manipulated in some way. This allows for a so-so image to be made truly wonderful. The number of options is completely overwhelming, and for someone who is inherently indecisive-well I just don't know where to begin, or where to end.

In a day and age when you can't trust what you see, this is a real image from my mom's front porch this morning. It was a normal, albeit chilly, morning until it started SNOWING!!!! and STICKING and its MARCH!!!!!!!

Enough exclaiming. Back to the unreal world Photoshop.

SOOC stands for straight out of camera. From there you can do about a million things. Here is the pic I posted last night. Speaking of indecision... I had to revisit this one again today 'cause I didn't like yesterdays version but it was late and I was getting tipsy, so I was forced to edit and run.

So then I cropped it and played around with the curves. This one is a little vintage feeling. I desaturated and changed the colors up a bit.

I used the sponge tool to turn up the saturation on his eyes. I used the auto contrast to brighten things up.

This is the one from last night that I went a little crazy with the exposure filter-not liking it today.

This is a super sweet one from the other day. I couldn't get enough light with the drapes drawn, so this one needed quite a bit of color correction to tone down the red. Here is the SOOC:

This one I desaturated, burned the edges, used an unsharp mask filter and a sponge on his face to brighten him back up a bit. I'm sure I did lots of other little tweaks as well. Doesn't he look angelic though?

Then I decided to kick it up a bit and play with the exposure. I like that feature it gives you all kinds of crazy effects. I like this one too. Oh the indecision.

This has taken half the day to post-with all the interruptions-and now the inch or so of snow is gone, and we are back to just another spring day. Thank you global warming!