onephotofocus for May

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 May photo that Stacy sent us was originally taken by Shane Francescut:

I saw lots of potential with this photo. I decided to have a go at it with just the app Snapseed(available for both iOS and Android). This app was recently given a complete overhaul and I thought this photo would be great to use to learn the ins and outs of the new version.

The first step I did was to crop the photo..not quite panoramic, but enough to remove the distracting teeter-totter in the foreground. I loved the dome and the tree on the right as well as the long greenhouse so I wanted to include all these items in a crop. I then used Spot Repair to remove the few distracting lacy branches on the far right. I tuned the image(brightness, ambiance, contrast, shadow and highlights)turning UP all of these features to some degree. The next step was Vintage…I used preset #6 and fine-tuned it a bit. The final step was HDR using the Nature setting on Fine. I did a bit of fiddling with the HDR preset, looked closely at the revised photo and declared it done! Surprisingly it only took about 5 minutes….but I was very happy with the outcome, especially the dramatic wispy sky:

My husband really likes it too!

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.