Mother Nature wasn’t really on my side for today’s photo prompt. I have seen some absolutely gorgeous and brilliant skies recently, but today was the day the prompt actually was looking for sky color. The afternoon and early evening around my particular corner of the world was filled with dark, not very colorful clouds. The prompt specifically asked for us to take a silhouette of something against the sky, and then to adjust the sky color in photo editing software until we got a nice, autumn feel. I worked with what I had this evening. I ended up choosing my neighbor’s pampas grass as the subject of my silhouette, which I shot looking upward from my knees. Not being any sort of Photoshop expert, I played with some of the color sliders and came up with a purply sky that pleased me somewhat:
It’s “aw-ight” I suppose. Nothing like the gorgeous pinks and golds I’ve been seeing lately, and I don’t have the skillz to produce that sort of thing in Photoshop, or even know how possible that would be in Photoshop. Here’s the SOOC:
Any thoughts about what you would have done with it? Please don’t be shy in the comments! I can take it! 😉
ETA: Brian of FS Photography did a beautiful job adding just the colors I would have loved to add myself to my picture. He said it took less than a minute to do! I want to go to the Funky Slug School of Photoshop!
Karma's When I Feel Like It Blog 
I don’t own PhotoShop, largely because if I had it I would spend all my time playing with it and never get anything else done. Ever. So I have very rudimentary things to play with. Given that disclaimer . . . I would have tried inverting the colors–making sort of a color negative–and then playing with that. I don’t know what the proper terminology would be. There probably isn’t proper terminology for that sort of thing. Most things I think are fun don’t have proper terminology associated with them. Ah well.
Comment by Gerry — October 22, 2010 @ 9:57 pm |
It is a cool thought, Gerry. I have Photoshop Elements, which is a cut down version of Photoshop and I still don’t understand all of its powers. I prefer to get the photo as close to my liking as possible straight from the camera, then only make small adjustments in PSE if needed.
Comment by Karma — October 23, 2010 @ 8:57 am |
Wait till you see my most recent blog post. 🙂 I used Picasa to edit mine. I lessened the saturation then used a tint. I also deepened the shadows to make a more dramatic silhouette. The vignette I put on in Picnick. I’m still learning Photoshop where these edits don’t come to me as quickly as they do in the other software.
Comment by Becky Sue — October 22, 2010 @ 11:24 pm |
I’m going to have to have a look at Picnick. I see people doing very neat things with that. For those of you who haven’t been over to Becky’s site (maybe because for whatever reason WordPress isn’t letting her name link back to her site – I’ve noticed the same thing, Becky, when you comment at the Daily Click) go have a look at her post for this photo prompt: http://cggrlogan.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/picture-fall-darks-and-lights/
Becky and I have had an interesting few months of, I’m not even sure what to call it, serendipity maybe?
Comment by Karma — October 23, 2010 @ 9:03 am |
What you wanted to do is actually very easy in photoshop, simply by using layers… Layers are very much the key to any editing in Photoshop… You could have just created a new layer that graduated through the colours you wanted to add, and then blended that new layer with your original image… Yeah I know it sounds easy, but trust me, once you’ve done it a few times it really is easy… To do what you indicated would take literally only a couple of minutes… I know the colours aren’t great, but this took less than a minute to do… 🙂 http://funkyslug.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/karma.jpg
Comment by FS Photography — October 23, 2010 @ 5:44 am |
Oh Brian! I think the colors you added are beautiful and exactly what I was looking for with this post. I really need to learn more about this very powerful program. If it is fine with you, I’m going to add your version of this picture to this post. (If for some reason you’d rather I didn’t, let me know and I will take it down.)
Comment by Karma — October 23, 2010 @ 9:07 am |
LOL… Of course I don’t mind, it is your picture after all… Seriously though, if you want to know how easy it was, then I’ll try to run you through it as simply as I can… Have you used layers at all before ??..
Comment by FS Photography — October 23, 2010 @ 11:43 am
I have used layers only when following step-by-step instructions from my Photoshop Elements book. I’ve used it to soften the look of skin in a few photos.
Comment by Karma — October 23, 2010 @ 5:11 pm
You could also play with the color balance in Photoshop to add more red and magenta to give it a warmer, autumn-like feel. What Brian did with it is very nice. I like the silhouette.
Comment by Robin — October 23, 2010 @ 10:03 am |
I think I did play with the color balance, but it made the whole picture reddish, including the silhouette, which I didn’t care for.
Comment by Karma — October 23, 2010 @ 5:09 pm |
Ah well in that case you’ll find it a breeze… Just create a new layer, and fill it using your gradient tool (press G on your keyboard). Select the black to white gradient picker dropdown at the top left of your screen to bring up the gradient option palette… and select the colour preset you want, or make your own colours, and then click ok… Now just click and drag your cursor from the top to bottom of your screen… This will fill your new layer with the colours you chose… Now all you need to do is change the blending mode of your new layer, by clicking the “normal” blending mode dropdown from the top of the layers tool palette…. and choose either multiply or overlay… Job done… 🙂
Oh, and you gotta try playing with the opacity too on the layer to change its strength, and try some of the other blending modes too… Sure do hope this is helpful… 🙂
Comment by FS Photography — October 23, 2010 @ 7:14 pm |
This sounds like much more than a minute’s work to me, but I will give it a shot one of these days. Thank you for taking the time to write out the instructions.
Comment by Karma — October 24, 2010 @ 9:16 am |
Wow, Brian’s looks beautiful, but I do like your version, too (the first image), although I think it could benefit from some noise removal. Not sure if you can do that in Elements? I use PaintshopPro Photo and it’s built in.
Comment by thedailyclick — October 24, 2010 @ 9:47 am |
Have you tried RAW? I use Lightroom to process the RAW photo.
Comment by burstmode — October 24, 2010 @ 10:53 am |
I’ve never quite understood the benefits of shooting in RAW. I understand the photo files are quite large, but I don’t know more than that about RAW.
Comment by Karma — October 24, 2010 @ 4:49 pm |
Shooting in RAW allows you to edit the white balance and other aspects of a photo, as it captures photo information for more than just what you set the camera to shoot.
I am not a fan of the gradient sky photochop job though. You can definitely create a realistic sky in Photoshop, but it takes much more than a minute to achieve to make it actually look good.
Comment by S — October 28, 2010 @ 6:23 pm