WaterScapes

This week, as Christmas and the end of the semester, and unfortunately this class, draw ever nearer, we took pictures of 'waterscapes'. When I first heard the theme, grand visions of waterfalls and lakes danced in my head. But in the end, I took pictures of puddles in the driveway on a gray, rainy day. My picture did turn out pretty well, though. I chose this picture originally because I liked the reflection of the pole in the water, the way it looked into the distance, and the neighbor's blurry porchlight in the distance. Then, when it came time to edit, I had a lot of trouble deciding how I should go about it. I tried about seventy different ways, and the best are displayed here. Of course, the first one (above) is the one I'm officially submitting to be graded and voted upon. I chose it because I felt it was the most unique and creatively edited, and I thought it looked really cool. I started, of course, by cropping it. Then I ran Ashley's clean and did something to one of the layers, rather by accident, where I turned it to "satin", which I liked the effect of. Then I brightened it up a bit. At this point, I saved it as the image below. But to get to the image above, I dramatically increased the saturation, which blurred it a little, but I think it gives it the feel of an oil painting. I love the brightness of the blues, the smudged light, and the general painting feel of it. I would like to have made it brighter a little, and perhaps a tad more colorful, but I think this is good.

This is the above picture pre-saturation

This comes from the same picture and the same crop, but I ran my action on it (minus the dodge and burn). I adjusted the color curves to brighten the colors, lightened it up a bit, ran sharpen, then flattened it. Then I decided to make it black & white.

Once again, same picture, same crop, as these all are, but I ran 'Aurea' from 50 photoshop post-work actions. I like how it makes it sort of foggy, and very vague and mysterious. 

This is the picture with the 'Retro Wet' action from 50 photoshop post-work actions. I like the wonky colors. They make it funky.

And those are just some of the ways we edited this picture this week beyond the violet mist!

(I commented on 'Kobliska's' picture. )