Saturation and Mood

[jpeterb]

Howdy folks.

I have a question regarding two different saturation levels of the same photo. Here's my thinking. In the image with greater saturation, the word "halt" in red pops out, which emphasises it being a commanding word. On the other hand, the photo with less saturation has a sort of older feel, which seems to fit a bit more with the idea (in my mind) that "halt" isn't really a word that gets used too often anymore, and possibly adds to the more worn out aspects of the sign. I like both versions, but I'm interested in what other folks have to say.

Here's the part where I talk about how inexperienced/new I am to this:
I'm also quite new at putting marginal effort into photos so please give general critiques of the photo(s) as well. There are some weird reflections in the sign that I'm not to crazy about due to the sign being wet when I took the photo. I can go reshoot at my leisure, as this is about 1 minute from my apartment. Thanks in advance for your help. Here are the photos:

[LeeR]

What about a third option? I ran this through PS and did two things differently. 1) I cropped a little off the bottom; just enough to eliminate the angled line coming up from the middle to strengthen the composition. (By the way, your overall composition is fabulous. You actually have some rhythm going on here which is rare in a photograph.) 2) I then used 'Curves' to desaturate the blue channel and increase the red. This left me with an essentially monochromatic image but for the brilliant red. (Mono plus one bold color is nearly always very dramatic.) Try it yourself and see if you don't like it.

[jpeterb]

Thanks so much for the input! I'm still running on a basic editing system (iPhoto). I'll have to upgrade to something that lets me manipulate the individual channels then give it a whirl. Thanks again!

[LeeR]

Sorry, didn't know you were without editing software. (You can find some freebies here.) Until you can do this on your own, then, here is what I got:



I used several items from my bag of tricks to get this final result just to show you what is possible. I am sure you will be doing much better than this in no time.

[jpeterb]

Cool! Thanks for the links to the editing software. So here's what I came up with using GIMP:



I ended up putting the "halt" half of the sign, the blue half of the sign, and the rest of the photo ('the background') each in their own layers. Completely desaturated the blue half, turned down the saturation on the background (plus some minor tweaks to other levels) and adjusted the curves on the red "halt." Oh yeah, and the crop across the bottom, which is key. Probably a little more complicated than it needed to be, but it was a good first tour of some of the things the editing software can do. The downfall of dividing up the picture like that is trying to make sure the whites in the various layers stay at least somewhat similar to each other. It was good to think about and get the wheels turning a bit and just experiment. Thanks again.

[LeeR]

Great! I see you are off to the races with GIMP. It's a great program and as I said, there are many here that have that and no intention of buying anything else. You have done the things I did on this one so there is no reason you can't do this on your own in the future. Good luck. Let me know if you get stuck.