onephotofocus for February

I skipped out of the One Four Challenge this month since I am taking 2 intensive online classes. One class is on gelatin monoprinting on fabric and the other is a quilting class. But I couldn’t completely eliminate photography challenges and I came across an interesting photo challenge through blogs involved in the One Four Challenge and joined up. It is just once a month so I thought I could handle that! You can read about it here. Basically Stacy at VisualVenturing.com sends everyone who signs up for the challenge the same photo and everyone edits it however they wish. Hence the name of the challenge: OnePhotoFocus! Since this was my first attempt at this challenge I stayed pretty conservative…

This is the photo that Stacy sent us to edit. The photo was by Manal Ali at A Single Shutter:

I knew I wanted to remove the distortion and to remove the plastic bag caught in the tree…but other than that I wasn’t sure. Maybe an attempt to decrease the overblown sky?? So, as usual I just played with some apps, pushed some buttons and kept going till I liked what I saw. I jumped back and forth from my computer and iPad depending on which program I wanted to use. Often there was no real logic as to why I used one photo-editing program over another, other than familiarity.

I tried straightening the jpeg image with the iPad app SKRWT, but it caused most of the tree to disappear. So I tried the correction in the desktop version of Photoshop instead(using the auto-corrected RAW image) and it worked better(but not quite enough). My next modification was in Lightroom, using a preset to increase clarity. I then sent the photo back to my iPad for further playing.

I tried SKRWT again to finish the straightening…all set! With the app TouchRetouch I removed the plastic bag in the tree….

Next into the Snapseed app to decrease the brightness in the sky with the selective adjust tool. However, this made the sky look slightly splotchy, so I sent the photo back to my computer to play in Photoshop again.

In Photoshop, I added a texture from pixelphotoart.com(soft damask at multiply 40%)which did help even out the sky, but gave the whole photo a greenish cast. [I think I have to learn about masks]…..To remove the color cast, I added a blue color correction and watercolour effect using the desktop version of Pixlr. This step was only partially successful at removing the greenish cast….

Almost done…..but I wanted to add a bit of texture, so in Photoshop Elements I applied the film grain filter. This filter really seemed to make the details “pop”. Last step was an adjustment with the hue slider in a further attempt to make the photo slightly less green.

So, half of my steps seemed to be to correct for over-adjustments in the previous steps!! And it is also possible that I have forgotten some steps(oops).  Next time I will take screenshots at various stages to keep track and show the edits in progress…..

This is my edit of the photo:

Not a huge difference, but things are straightened, the plastic bag is gone and there is more sharpness and detail(especially noticeable in the storefronts on the bottom right).

I am very curious as to what the other participants did..but I won’t know till this post is published and linked to Stacy’s post…so we will all be surprised at the same time! Check out the results here.

If you want to check out any of the apps or photo-editing programs a Google search should lead you right to them.