3/02/2008

Transition of a Picture

When I first shot this photo of a momma gator and her baby, I looked at the histogram on the camera and saw that I had an average photo and I wasn't too unhappy with the distribution. I did not see a large spike at either end of the histogram and not flat top on the spikes. It had a lot of promise and I could work with the results. Once in Adobe Photoshop Elements I made a layer and left the first layer locked.





I opened the adjustments and in the histogram there I selected the darkest part of the photo with the dark Pic and the lightest item with the right pic. (Pics look like little eyedroppers) I clicked on the middle spike in the histogram and with the alt button pressed I moved it a little.
The color was almost good at that point but,





I copied a few pixtels and cloned the white rock out by the baby gators rear leg. Icropped it down a little and then flattened the layers back. I think this is a great shot now and I could have just cropped out the momma's head and left the baby gator. I like the transition from the original to my final copy.

3 comments:

  1. Looks like you had a great trip and have got some great photos to show for it! I've done a couple of the free trials of Photoshop Elements (5 and then 6), but I never did get the layers figured out before the trials were up. This afternoon I've been thinking about getting the CS3 trial, but I don't know if I'd ever be satisfied with Elements again. All CS3 versions are insanely expensive!

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  2. Adobe PhotoShop Elements 6 is about $99 without any credits. I don't think they will give me any credit for APE 2. The layers is just a way to change the original without chewing up the base photo. After you make it do what you want it to do you "Flatten" it back and save the new picture as .1 or .2 as you desire. MUD

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  3. You have got to teach me how to do that, amazing.

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