As a change of scenery, here’s an inanimate object that works well for stock photography.  And with stock photography, you’re usually trying to tell a story, so the story could either be a run down railroad crossing sign, or a more vibrant colored setting where it looks like the sign is actually being used.  I chose the later.

Work that was done:

• Cleanup of the background, to make a nice blue sky.  A little tricky because the sky had some specific texture to the clouds, so you couldn’t just clone from anywhere to anywhere else.
• Color enhancement – saturated the blues and adjusted the contrast a little, to bring out more texture in the sign.
• Straightened the sign in the image.
• “Turned on” the red light by making a curves adjustment layer that brightened up the mid tones and painted a mask just where the bulb was (and right around it for some glow onto the nearby metal).

You can also see this image at fotolia.com.

When I first saw this image, I really thought there was no hope, but after playing with it for a few minutes in Adobe Camera Raw, I realized there was a lot of information in those shadows, mostly because I shot in Raw format.  I’ve actually started shooting Raw+Jpg in most cases because then I have a processed image ready to go if I want it, but I also have the ability to do more extreme work with the Raw image if there’s a need to.  When I got it brightened up, I realized there was some nice contrast between her bright face and the dark background, and her darker body and the lighter background, which would read well as a black & white image.  Here’s the process I went through to get to the After image:

• Pulled the exposure WAY up.
• Did some custom manipulations during the Black & White conversion, such as making the oranges brighter to give better contrast.
• Got rid of most of the noise.  By adjusting the exposure level so much, a lot of noise was revealed.  Some came out in ACR, and then I use the Noise Ninja plugin inside of Photoshop to go the rest of the way.
• A little bit of split-toning.  I pushed the shadows into the blue range, and the highlights more into the yellow range.  Just for fun.

To see more of these before & after images in a gallery, go on over to the babynounce facebook page!

This retouch was done mostly to just stylize the picture for art’s sake.  Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks.  He cried for about 30 seconds, and then wanted to get back on the bikes and go again.  And most of that redness in the “after” image was enhanced to look more dramatic.

I actually liked the image quite a bit straight out of the camera.   It was taken on a sunny day, with some off-camera flash fill on the left of camera (the sun acts as a rim light on his left side).  For the sake of making a fun exaggerated image, I did the following things to it:

• boosted the contrast
• erased the white line and the leaves using the healing brush and the clone tool.  I didn’t like the way the line connected directly to his helmet, like it was part of him
• enhanced the tear on his cheek and the abrasions on his wrist and elbow to be more obvious
• pulled out more detail in the pavement by doing a high-pass filter of the image and blending it on top in linear light mode.

If I had thought about it when I was taking the picture, I would have placed the crashed tricycle behind him in the background too, to tell the story better!

We’ve now started to also do photo retouching as a standalone service!  We can do color correction/enhancement, black & white conversion, replacing people or objects, adding effects, and any other types of image manipulation.

We’re now trying to build up our gallery of samples of photo retouching, and are looking for some good images to work on for free.  To find out how to get involved, click on the “Continue Reading” link:

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Well another year has passed, and it was time to do the annual Christmas Card.  We got started a little earlier this year, and did a photo shoot to get our base pictures, which we would then end up compositing into a picture of some Christmas ornaments on a white background.  Here’s the end result:

For more “behind the scenes” pictures and information, click on the “Continue Reading” link:

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