Tag Archives: Photoshop

Photoshopping Bodium Castle

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It seems that I cant help but stay up late at night seeing what can (and can’t) be done with photoshop. If you are reading this on Planet Atheism looking for Atheist / free thinking content – sorry nothing to see here. I will keep this short and sweet though.

For those who still resit the wonders of photoshop, this is an example of what it can do to an other wise dreary picture taken in poor weather. The source photo was, it must be said, pretty uninspiring. However after a total of 14 minutes in photo shop (most of that was waiting for the disk thrashings to stop, the source image was massive so the file was about 90mb) it now looks a lot more dramatic and is something people would actually want to look at.

Original Picture - Bodium Castle, 5 May 07 Photoshopped Picture - Bodium Castle 05 May 07

Yes, the effects are a bit over the top, I did get carried away with myself, and the low quality used to resize them into something you can download and view has impacted it a bit, but I am sure you get the gist of the point I am trying to make.

Digital photo editing rocks.

[tags]adobe, digital-photographs, digital-camera, digital-culture, Castles, Bodium, National Trust, Sussex, pictures, photoshop, photos, photography, photographs, photo-software, photo-effects, technology[/tags]

Value of Camera Processing

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Taking some snapshots today led me to thinking about the “value” of using the on-camera processing options to take pictures as Black and White or Sepia (or even low colour), rather than taking every shot as high colour and doing any processing in Photoshop. Now for clarification purposes, I do not have a “real” DSLR (Kodak Z650) so taking the pictures in RAW is not an option and therefore some camera processing is inevitable.

Today, as I was snapping some pictures of country houses and landscapes, I realised I was often switching between Black and White, Sepia and High Colour. Not a massively difficult task but time consuming – in some instances I was taking three pictures of each “shot” rather than a single high colour one.

Common sense was screaming out to me that I should just take the high colour, but the residual technophobe in me seems to distrust Photoshop, so I had to experiment a little. I took three shots of a fairly neutral landscape scene, black and white, sepia and high colour, then passed the high colour JPEG through photoshop and made copies in black and white and sepia. The only other PC processing these images have had is a pass through Advanced Batch Converter to resize them into something which can be shown here. Continue reading →

Miracle of Photoshop

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As mentioned previously, I have taken a few photos of Bodiam Castle (National Trust site in Sussex) and have been pushing them through Photoshop.

The wonders of Photoshop filters can never, ever, be overstated. Here you can see the results of a ten second experiment with a single picture. The first image is the basic image which was then passed through the mosaic filter, the texturizer and desaturated. All of these produce some interesting effects which radically change the impact of the original photograph.

Bodiam Castle - Initial Photograph Bodiam Castle - First Effect - Mosiac Bodiam Castle - Second Effect - Texturiser Bodiam Castle - Third Effect - Desaturate

All this strikes me as pretty impressive for what took up about 5 minutes of my life. In fact, it took longer to write this post about the effects (and upload the images) than it did to create them. I really do like photoshop 🙂

Stonehenge and Photoshop

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It has been a while since I posted some quick edit photographs here, so I will try to make amends. These are two photographs of Stonehenge (World Heritage site in Wiltshire) I took in December when the ground was frosty and the visitors were thin on the ground. I have pushed them through a variety of Photoshop filters to create the additional effects:

Stonehenge in the Winter Photograph with Poster Effect Stones in shadows Stones in shadows - greyscale Stones in shadows - greyscale with added sepia overtone and blue overtone on sky.

On an additional note, in addition to massive visitor numbers, Stonehenge is often inundated by “druids” and new-age hippies in the summer, come the cold weather and they are noticeable by their absence. For some reason the idea that Stonehenge is a “summer” monument.

I can understand, say, 50 years ago, people thinking this but surely almost all modern studies point to any religious significance of this site being focused on the midwinter solstice?

I should point out, there are die-hards who turn up for the midwinter solstice – even if they don’t know what the correct date is – but no where near the scale of the midsummer one.

Maybe modern people just cant take the cold as well….

[tags]Stonehenge, Photographs, Pictures, Images, Photoshop, Image Effects, Black White, Sepia, Megaliths, English Heritage, National Trust, Wiltshire, Druids, Solstice, Midwinter, Midsummer, World Heritage Site, Religion, Stone Age, Cults, Culture, Society[/tags]

Old Photos

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To try and change the subject away from Religious crackpots for a little while, I thought I would upload some photos! Here are a selection from and . As you can see these are quite old photos which have been scanned in.

Stonehenge Stonehenge - different angle Houses at Stourhead Church at Stourhead

Ok, in reality, they have been run through Adobe Lightroom which is actually a wonderful bit of software. I downloaded the beta version quite some time ago but never really made any use of it. Today I had a reminder it was going to expire on 28 Feb so I thought I would try it out.

It is not a photo / picture editing package along the lines of Photoshop but it is excellent for photo management and applying quick preset filters to pictures. This one is called “Antique Grayscale” and seems to be a mix of normal greyscale and sepia tones. I quite like the effect 🙂

Where Lightroom really excells is in creating Web Sites for photo galleries. It is amazing how easily this will take a collection of picures and turn them into a functional, usable (valid XHTML!) website. There is only limited control (in the beta version) over the exact style but the look and feel is good enough that most people wont mind. If you are a graphic artist or photographer, and want a quick and easy website, this package really is the best I have seen. Before my trial version runs out, I fully intend to upload some sample sites so you can see the output. At the moment I did two quick sites (one flash gallery and one html gallery) which are now online. Remember, you need ActiveX and flash player to view the flash site in IE.

As a rule of thumb, a site with 28 pictures takes about 30 seconds to select the pictures, a few mins to type in some basic details and then another 30 seconds to build the site. It really is that quick. The longest part is uploading the images!

This is pretty much software that anyone who can actually copy a image to their computer, can use to create photo galleries in seconds.

Wonders of Photoshop

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Statue of Neptune at StourheadFrom the wonders of Photoshop is this slightly enhanced statue at Stourhead. Basically all I have done is a box blur on the background, a slight enhancement of the white levels of the statue and increased saturation and contrast.

Personally, I think it looks quite nice and I look forward to the day when the crazy monotheistic religions are overhauled and we all get back to worshipping the likes of Neptune (or Poseidon if you are feeling particularly classical today).

We should get back to a time when Gods were proper Gods, not the wet blankets we have today. More thunderstorms! Anyway, all joking aside, I would have liked to have shown the original for comparison but in a fit of foolishness, I saved the changed file JPG over the original. Doh.