onephotofocus for April

I came across an interesting photo challenge through blogs involved in the One Four Challenge and joined up. 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!

The April photo that Stacy sent us was originally taken by Cee Neuner:

 

I had a really hard time with this photo…because no matter what I did to it, I couldn’t really improve it…the white and black detail and contrast is great…the green tree looks great(although a little oddball- as expected from Cee!), no real distracting elements(except maybe the pale green shelves on the left). The photo could use a bit of brightening..but that isn’t enough for this challenge! You might think that the photo could use some more detail in the middle of the tree where it is dark…but that just makes it look ugly since it is all branch and no leaves.

So…I decided that I would just use my newest app called Etchings(available on the Apple Store). One problem: the app works best with square photos. So I had to crop the photo square…..My favorite part of the photo is the section with the lovely black metal chairs but I couldn’t crop just to those because the image began to get pixelated and didn’t really provide enough to make an exciting photo! So I compromised and cropped it to contain most of the tree and the area towards the right including the chairs.

The etching app converted the photo to what looks like a coloured pencil sketch of a summer beach cottage. So this is my version for April:

I like the way the app adds some interesting etching details and created a few extra colours too! I quite like this app.

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.