I have spent some of my Christmas holiday taking pictures which can be seen at the twoviews blog pages, but I am also reading up about techniques including software editing.
Using editing makes it very simple to change colours and the same image can appear very differently. In both cases I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 and put in a solid opaque base layer and then merged the original picture and the opaque layer to get new images. The blue cyan image was done as cyanotype. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints.The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints. It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection. Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.
The software editing attempts were pretty experimental and reminded me just how important it is to get the right shot with the camera first and foremost. You can edit for hours and hours, but you need to ensure the photo is actually good enough in the first place! :)
you are so right! in fact i spent an hour editing photos from yesterday and then looked at them today and realised i had made them all look really "fake" there is a place for editing, but sometimes its all too tempting to go too far, in this case i fished out the originals and started again with just a tiny tweak here and there!
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