onephotofocus for November

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 November photo that Stacy sent us was originally taken by Helen Chen:

The first step in editing this interesting photo was to play with exposure…to open up the interior of the structure. I thought about cloning out the red object in the interior but found that the photo looked dull without it since the red colour really draws the eye into the photo. I cropped a bit to remove some of the distracting supports on the left hand side, applied auto perspective and then applied a Lightroom preset to add some colour and light. The preset I used was from 2LilOwls and called At the Vineyard 1.

Since I just learnt how to use the ipad art app called Brushstrokes, I decided to see if I could get an interesting effect with this app. I applied the Simple 3 preset and re-uploaded the edited photo back to my computer. A few final adjustments in Photoshop Elements to slightly decrease saturation, adjust hue and to modify levels gave me my final edit for November:

I really like how the red object pops…and I think the brushstrokes from the iPad app add to the leaf and tree structures from the original photo.

As usual, 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.