Mr. Me

April Snow

An unexpected surprise in the morning. Lots of snow

April Snowfall

When this late snowfall arrived last year, I grabbed my camera and started snapping pictures. The combination of snow and blooming, green plants is amazing. The snow that’s falling down is actually coming from melting snow from the overhead trees. It was weird, all of a sudden the sun came out from behind the clouds, and big clumps of snow started falling everywhere. I took cover, and started shooting like mad.

1. I started by adding contrast to the sky, mountains, and the grass around the trampoline.

2. Here I’ve added more contrast to various parts of the image. I must have done something tricky with the way the contrast was added because the highlights are affected the most in the mountains, but down by the trampoline the shadows are affected the most.

3. I was messing around with the gradient map tool to get this. A similar image could be made with the curves tool. I overlayed this image with the previous image to get the image in picture #4

4. This is the resulting image after overlaying picture #3 with picture #2

Another pic showing one of the blossoms close up.

Woody Scene

This picture was a revolutionary picture for me. I discovered an interesting style for creating pictures. It works like this.

duplicate the top layer
use the GMIC filter “old photo”
use the GEGL filter c2g
set the layer mode to value

After doing a bunch of other preliminary tweaks, I used the above series of steps on the featured image and loved the results. In trying to replicate these results in other images, I found a few helpful tips that I’ve listed below. When applying this affect keep in mind:

The old photo affect adds these annoying black splotches and changes the image to a sepia image. To fix this use GMIC’s custom code (global) filter instead of the old photo filter and type in -noise 20 -bilateral 30,60 -blur 2 -sharpen 100 -n 0,255 you can tack on a -sepia to that if you want to get the sepia affect.
Before applying the c2g filter, experiment with adding masks to the old photo layer. Splotchy looking masks created with paint brushes that have a big spread work well.
These filters take awhile to process. Especially the c2g filter, which can take hours to process if you push the sliders to far. You’ll also end up with a normal black and white picture, so your not going to want to push the c2g sliders too far. At the same time, the c2g filter often looks better when the sliders are pushed up a little.

The photo after the old photo look was applied

old photo with additional processing — Afterwards I went back to the old photo pic and did some additional processing to get this image.

alternate processing of the image to bring out the colors.

not so good pic — My original attempt at trying to replicate the look of the pic of the aspen trees. Completely terrible.

sucessfully replicated the aspen tree style — Eventually I figured out how to replicate the look I wanted.

processed without the sepia coloring — same style, but without the sepia coloring

Mountain View

This is an earlier version of this masterpiece. See that version for background info.

Flipped Tree

I love the way this image almost looks natural when it’s flipped on it’s side. You can see a version of the picture flipped upright here. That same link also describes some of the techniques I used to manipulate the color in the image.

colorful mountainside — This used to be the final version of the image.

original image — this one is the original

Sharpening and Noise Reduction

How We analyze the problem Sharpening and noise reduction directly affect each other. When reducing noise, the picture becomes blurrier. Increasing sharpness can enhance noise, and create sharpening artifacts. Taken to the extreme, noise can be eliminated, and sharpness can be enhanced, at the cost of loosing all the details in an image. […]

Composition

Composition > Technicalities Composition. The absolute requirement of every image. In a cage match between an improperly exposed, out of focus image with great composition and an image with uninteresting composition and terrific exposure and focus, the improperly exposed, out of focus image with great composition would come out laughing victoriously. Master composition and you’ve mastered photography. […]

Manipulating Color

Methods Of Changing Color More control can be gained over an image by decomposing an image first and then manipulating the color channels in either RGB, LAB, CMYK, YCrCb, and HSV mode. HSV and LAB are my favorite modes for editing colors. The G’MIC plugin for GIMP gives you the ability to edit colors in […]

Welcome

Welcome to the website. You can expect to see some articles on photography for people of all different skill levels. Some interviews with other photographers. I’ll show how I edit my pictures. And if there is anything you would like to see on this site feel free to leave a comment. (If you navigated to this spot with the arrows on the side, know that if you keep navigating to the right you’re going to hit a bunch of articles about game design. You’ll want to move left through the articles to see the ones about photography.)

test_image

Glossary

depth of field (DOF): The amount of the picture that is in focus. A smaller aperture will create a larger depth of field, and a bigger aperture will create a bigger depth of field. aperture: The opening that allows light into the camera. Most cameras can change the size of this opening. exposure: How bright/dark a picture […]

More pics

looking for some more fabulous pics. Brighten up your day with pics from my G+ @http://mrme/+