Location Taken: Wyoming
Time Taken: November 2012
I’ve continued playing around with the color manipulation options in the graphics program I’m learning, and well, today I played with a photo that I didn’t screw up!
Well, aside from the fact that I took it entirely at the wrong time of day. The sun was low and well, no matter how fantastic the cliffs lining the road are, they still will block light trying to go through them. It’s like they’re made of solid rock or something crazy like that!
But well, it’s only a couple MB, I’ve got the space to take photos of imperfect setups that I’m not likely to visit again for months or years or decades.
So here’s the way it came out on the camera:
Not too bad, really, but the bright sky just completely overpowers the details in the cliff face. So I went in there and tweaked that color this way and this color that way until it came out to a vaguely acceptable stage.
Really, that’s how it works. I’m using a tool called Curves that, well, you’ve got lines representing aspects of the colors at various levels, say the red colors in the dark tones, shown on a graph. If you tweak the line up a bit, a bit more red is added to the dark areas, and if you tweak it down it loses red. And you just go through and tweak this little bit of the line a little up and that a little down to shift the colors around until it does what you want it to.
Ok, I’m finding that tough to understand without a picture and I’m the one who wrote it, so bam, picture!
It really doesn’t take much to shift the colors. You may notice how close those lines still are to their starting point, which was a simple straight 45 degree line from corner to corner. I only moved the line up or down by 10 or so pixels at each of the points. It’s really easy to get it off, and small movements make a big difference.
If you don’t believe me, well, that set of curves isn’t for either of the versions above. I didn’t think to take a screenshot of that while I was tweaking, so I just roughed one up later, pushing the lines up and down semi-randomly.
THIS is what those curves produced:
I especially like the pink sky.
And just think, this is an EASY graphics tool to use! There’s FAR more difficult ones out there!
