FKH PHOTO JOURNAL

I received a request a few days ago from Brenda of Brenda's Arizona for more before-and-after shots with information on how I went from the before to the after. So this is my first attempt at explaining a before-and-after shot chronologically with pictures of each step. The only processing program I use is Picnik which you can find online at picnik.com. It is a simple, easy-to-use program, and it's very cheap. Actually the basic program is free! I do subscribe to the premium program (which costs all of $2 a month) and you will need that premium program to accomplish some of the tasks detailed below.
Someday I hope to learn Photo Shop, but right now I only own a point-and-shoot camera so until the time comes that I own a REAL camera I refuse to spend any more money on toys. I'm saving my money for something the big girls use.

Step 1:

This was straight out of the camera of some dried-up leaves. It's been sitting in my photo tray for a few months while I pondered what to do with it. As I started working with it I found that it is one of those photos that has tremendous potential, so much in fact I couldn't decide what I liked best. Usually the first thing I do is go to the edit function and click on Auto Fix. It does its business and usually you get a little more clarity, a little more color vibrance. On this picture it did nothing. So I canceled that. The next step is to click on the Exposure button and again hit Auto Fix. Sometimes this gives a good effect, sometimes not. Again, nothing on this photo. I have learned that while you are in the Exposure window you will usually get a pop by checking the box on the right that says Local Contrast. Then depending on the background I usually increase the shadows, which will blur the background and make it darker. At this step I moved the Highlight bar to 14, the Shadows bar to 23, and the Strength bar to 58. This was the result:

Step 2:

I really liked the way this turned out - sharper with a blurred background, crisper and a more vibrant coloration of the brown leaves and now you can really see those little dots on the leaves that give the photograph some texture. At this point, still in the Edit window, I go to Auto Colors. Again, you never know what the little man behind the computer screen is going to do to your picture. Sometimes he does a great job and you're pleased. Other times .... well, his eyes must be getting tired. Today he decided that the temperature should be set at something crazy like minus 58. I didn't agree, so I just threw a cancel button at him right between the eyebrows and manually moved the saturation bar to 5 and the temperature bar to 20 (mind you, that's plus 20, compared to his minus 58). The next picture is what I got.

Step 3:

Not much difference you say. I say it's just enough to be striking. More vibrance, more sharpness. I'm pleased. There are other things you can do in edit, such as crop, resize, get rid of red eye, rotate the picture, none of which were necessary for this one (except I did resize because all my pics are REALLY big). So now it's time to go to another window, the Create mode. This is where all the fun starts. The first stop along this part of the journey will be found in the Effects window. First I converted the photo to black and white. Why? Because my friend Rebecca at The Dusty Cellar Shoots does this a lot and she is a rock star in the world of photography and I aim to take photos like she does someday. I never seem to have the kind of luck she does with converting to black and white and then going down the highway of creativity from there (could it be the quality of the original photo? Nah!), but I do it and I try using all sorts of red and yellow and blue and green filters and usually just wind up hitting cancel, cancel, undo, undo. But there are tons of things in this window that you can try out. I halfway thought about using an HDR effect to really bring out the prominence of those dots in the leaves, but I abandoned that thought pretty quickly. I even was tempted to tune up the vibrance but that seemed a bit of an overkill here. I would up doing nothing in the Effects Window but went from there to the Advanced window. I felt like a real grown-up the first time I ventured into Advanced. In this window you find such things as Cloning, Curves, Levels, Dodging and Burning. Cloning? I'm still not sure how Dolly the sheep got cloned so I haven't been there yet. I've tried Dodging and Burning a couple of times, I've tried Curves a few more times but I'm still not sure what I'm doing when I go there, and as far as Levels go, the only time I've used a level is when I've hung a picture on the wall. But at this point, since I've experimented a little bit with Curves and have some familiarity, I played around with all the various Preset buttons. Most of them are pretty radical and it didn't take long to decide I didn't need those. Then I went to the button that say RGB. I have no idea what that stands for. Maybe Real Good Bodacious stuff? But when you click on it you get choices of red channel, green channel and blue channel and a graph. Oh, good Lord, not another graph. I thought I gave those up in high school math back in the 1960s! Oh, well, I'm game. Bring it on. I put in a red channel. Now, mind you, this big graph in Curves, which I don't fully understand and I certainly have no education as to the terminology, but while I was manipulating the line on the graph and seeing what result it would bring I settled on a descending curve to the lower right. What does that mean? I don't have a clue, but I finally got a color combination that I thought was quite striking. Here it is!

Step 4: Whoa, is that cool or what? I love what adding the red curve did to this photograph. It turned all that gray dappled junk in the background turned into this beautiful turquoise color and added some green to the leaves so the plant looks like it still has some life in it although we all know it's a goner. I could have easily quit here, but I had to try one more thing.

Step 5: This is the end result after adding the RGB blue channel on top of the red one with a 31% fade. I love how the goldenness of the leaves jumps out but yet it still maintains some of that beautiful turquoise blue in the background. I didn't use the green channel because it didn't tickle my fancy but, you know, it's different strokes for different folks. I actually like all these variations of the same picture. I think my favorite is Step 4. I hope, if you're reading this, you've received some inspiration on different things you can do to one lousy picture to make it a superstar!