Mary Ann's Photo Gallery and Tips

Thanks Edna for the Blog Award...my 1st!

I'm not sure how to post this so will set it here for now.

I suppose I better come up with a great tip for all you Photoshop users.  Today I went out and shot my 1st HDR so maybe it should be about the new hot way to process your photos.

This has certainly been a fun week.  In Redbubble I was notified that my photo of Man and His Guitar was grabbed a Feature Award.  This is the photo that is in a previous blog entry which I also won a ribbon at the Interstate Fair.  It is a real honor as there are so many entries to chose from, most times way over 50. 

Gene and I went out in the 1985 Corvette he purchased a few weeks ago and put on about 200 miles on the most beautiful September day.  I was able to photograph five round barns.  It is a surprise how few of these barns are still in existance in Wisconsin and how little care they are getting to preserve them for prosperity.  I will try to also publish the final workup of these photos here soon.  Since I only could shoot them from the road setting up a tripod and doing HDR didn't seem like the best use of me and my equipment.  I certainly didn't want to become a target or worst yet "road kill"!

WHITE METAL ROUND BARN IN WISCONSIN

In our Labor Day ride around Wisconsin Gene and I found several still standing round barns.  This is a smaller more machine shed type, however the silos nearby suggest that it could have been used for cows.  It is a metal barn with doors on both sides.  I used a Lucis-like effect in Lightroom to achieve the coloration.  The sky was plain, and with so much white there was not a lot of vivid color.  To acheive this look try this.

In Lightroom:

    Under Basic adjustments, slide Recovery to 100%

    Fill Light up to 100%

    Blacks to about 20-50, will adjust more later

    Contrast to 100%

    Clarity to 100%

    Vibrance to 100%

    Drop Saturation to -20 and bump it down as needed to get rid of gaudy color

    Go back and adjust Blacks and Exposure as needed.

    If one particular color is overpowering go to the HSL palette and adjust it's saturation

This is a simple way to enhance bright and dark areas of an image like a Photoshop plugin called LucisArt.  This is a look somewhat fimiliar to the HDR technique.