Digital Art – My Attempt at Photoshop

Over the past few years, and more so recently, I’ve seen and been intrigued with different digital manipulations of photos, especial HDR techniques. Check out Image Spike in my blog roll, or the Visual Thoughts blog that I visit. Finally, check out Dave Hill Photo for some amazing manipulations to portraits.

In the past, I’ve never been to big into photoshopping. I tended to think that if I couldn’t get the image correct in the camera, then it just wasn’t meant to be. But seeing more and more of these images, and how they can create a different feel than a photograph will ever be able to do, I finally decided to see what I could do. I took a few photos at the end of the day on Saturday of the guys gathering and packing up their chutes. When I saw the images on my computer, I thought these would be perfect photos to try to manipulate. I searched the web for some techniques (because I don’t have CS2 with the Merge to HDR feature) and finally found a few methods that I thought would give me the effect I was looking for. I tried a variation of a technique shared by Nill Photo Album (http://www.nill.cz/index.php?set=tu1), but removed the last step (I didn’t want the red rusty color) and played with the opacity of the color dodge layer. I also found that I needed to start with a seriously under saturated image to keep the photo from being ridiculously over saturated at the end. So here is an image of Neil Amonson after his jump.

Enjoy!

~ by cruxphoto on November 13, 2007.