Artsy Portrait

[roccstar2]

Hello!

Well I was just messing around with some self portraits that I had taken on my camera a few days back. This is the original pic:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevillel/463905397/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/219/463905397_8121aed36f.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="IMG_1496" /></a>

And after playing around on Picasa this is what I managed to get:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevillel/463905411/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/196/463905411_2f4daa2875.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="portrait reworked" /></a>

Or

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevillel/463905407/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/217/463905407_2cdf8451c5.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="portrait reworked 2" /></a>

I was really surprised to see what I did with that really plain original image. Picasa is really cool and even though I have a copy of photoshop I find Picasa to be a lot easier to use(I will be taking a course on Photoshop this summer).

What do you people think? Which one do you like better?

[Saralonde]

I love Picasa, especially for basic editing. Sometimes I'm amazed what people can accomplish with it though. This is a pretty cool effect. More like a drawing then a photograph. How did you do it?

[wulf]

It is amazing how much information can be retrieved from the shadows.

I would suggest removing (by cropping or painting out) the dark elements down the left hand side - I think they look messy rather than adding any balance. I would also be interested to see a similar effect but without the contrast pushed up quite so far, preserving more of the original shot (I like the white-out on the background but it would be nice to see more of the face).

Wulf

[roccstar2]

@Saralonde

Yep I did like this because of the drawing like effect.. ART! :)

Anyway getting this effect was embarrassingly easy.. All I did was go into editing mode of Picasa and went to the Tuning tab. Once there I just moved all the sliders to the right(to the max) and then it looked beautiful! I did say it was way too easy..

@Wolf

I was going to take out the black smudges on the left but I was really excited about how it turned out.. so just left it like it was and posted it on here..

Eh.. I don't like my face.. :)