Platte River

Critiques [Translate]

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• plimrn (16878)
• [2006-01-28 16:08]
• - [workshop] [compare]

I like it too; especially the framing of the boys under the arch of the tree. The Platte river sounds shallow and your picture validates my thinking.

I have a host of pictures from Australia and New Zealand taken with a cheap digital camera and know what it's like to wish they could be magically tranformed to something better.

Photoshop is the next best thing, even though my son thinks it's a travesty. I think some pictures are good enough to play with.

So this is what I did:
1. Enhance>lighting>Lighten shadows 24%
2. Used the magic wand selection tool to select the white areas of the sky, selected blue from a darker area and painted it in at 36% with a very large brush.
3. Selected most of the upper half of the photo with the pologonal selection tool, taking care to include all of the green areas.
4. Increased saturation in these areas.
5. This left the blue in the upper right corner a little too dark, so I slected that corner with the polygon selection tool.
6. In enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color:
select the blue with the eye dropper
Move fuzziness slider to 86
Lightness slider to +38

I'm out of photos for the day, but I'll post it tomorrow.

Photoshop Essentials is really cheap and it's a lot of fun to play with it. Of course a better use of time might be to practice getting better new photos with your new camera.