Whoa

I have been thinking about writing another post for a while now.  Especially after removing my last one as I didn't feel it was well written.

Luckily for me I decided to have a play with a photo that I thought could be edited better.  The photo in question (below) was taken at about 11am on a cloudy day on the road between Lairg and Laxford Bridge.  It was processed in Lightroom 4, however I felt I hadn't really managed to make it sing and kept going back to it.

On One software have the Perfect Photo Suite package and I have version 6.  To be fair I haven't used it that much as it seemed to be a little fiddly and I didn't get it.

I have no idea why, but I decided to open the photo and run it through the effects part.  This allows you to add a variety of pre-set layers to the photo adjusting the opacity before compressing them and saving the end result as a psd (photoshop) file.  These pre-sests are essentially shortcuts to save you spending hours in photoshop getting the same results

 The photo below is my first attempt and whilst I feel it is a bit over the top I was amazed at the detail and colour that came out.

As many of you will now be well aware this got me thinking (never a good idea) about my other photos as I am my harshest critic and always feel like I could do far better.  Needless to say I started going through previous photo edits and others that I discarded for a variety of reasons.

First up for the edit was a photo of Laxford Bridge which had been lacking something.  The result below left me happy with it and made me think even more.

I then decided to experiment on a photo that I couldn't do much with. It was taken on a very cold, wet and windy day in Glencoe and I was stumped.  Whilst the photo probably won't win any awards the time spent tweaking gave an atmospheric photo.

Now, I have several photos of The Falls of Falloch that I felt I could do better with.  The results below speak for themselves.

I went through a lot of photos and re-edited a most of them, but I was in for a surprise.

This photo of Edinburgh from Calton Hill as taken in May 2009 and after some editing I left it as I didn't think I could do anything with it.  I was wrong.

Last Monday I opened up Perfect Photo Suite 6 and loaded the photo.  After several attempts I had a result I was content with.

To save syncing my Iphone (lazy ass) I loaded the photo to Facebook and then saved to the phone so I could post to twitter.

I posted the photo to Twitter and have had the most retweets of any photo I have ever put on it.  It also got a lot of likes on facebook as well.

What has this taught me?  

I need to keep pushing and trying new things so that I can get better at what I do.  Also, that sometimes I do get it right first time.