What Would You Do? (#25)

[Nicole]

Twenty-five weeks that we've been doing the What Would You Do threads thanks to a suggestion by xxpinballxx In the last 25 weeks we have edited pictures of:

1. A girl with an umbrella
2. A dancing couple
3. A bee with a flower
4. A rural landscape (with some people too)
5. A mountainous landscape
6. A cat
7. A yellow mushroom
8. A bird in a nest
9. A tasty cake
10. A smiling child
11. A kid on a dock
12. A guy and a goat
13. A guy looking like he's about to fall
14. A busy street scene
15. Dogs and frogs
16. Rainy lights
17. Flowers in a vase
18. Fish underwater (and a diver)
19. People taking pictures
20. A moth on a window
21. Volleyball players
22. A dandylion
23. A bird on a waterfall
24. A wasp in a web

That's a lot of different topics and I really hope that people have learned some things about different ways to post-process since these threads started. It's been really interesting going back through the threads while starting this week's topic. So, now that you've seen all that we've already done, this week we will move forward with another edit with a picture from peeperita


Available Larger

In case you haven't been with us for the last 25 weeks, the rules are simple, use the picture posted in this thread and edit it. Post the result back here and tell us what you did (hence why this thread is called what would you do ).

If you want your picture to be the subject of one of these threads, drop me a PM with a link to the medium and large size of the image. I'm always looking for new pictures. And you can see that any picture can be used, we've had quite a lot of different topics. So, if you enjoy these threads, why not consider letting people edit one of your pictures.

Now, let's see what you all would do this week!

[windrider86]

Wasnt quite sure what to do with this one so i came up with this.

Duplicated layer
Desaturated 2nd layer and then erased the tusks to keep them in color
Painted the background black- (I;m sure there is an easier way to do this)

merged layers
duplicated layers
Made into a negative image
added a heavy pencil artistic effect
and I think the last step was to apply a kaleidascope effect and then merged alyers and added a border

[Drax]

Hi, Nicole!

this #25 is a hard one.

What i did: (paintshoppro X2)
- One step photo fix
- Digital camera noise removal
- Sharpen
- Fill flash
- Find all edges
- Enhance edges more
- Trace contour
- One step photo fix
- Time Machine (Daguerreotype - 1839)

Et voilà!

[Murtasma]

wish i had the internet at home so I could participate in these

[mhuk05]

I used the color match feature of PhotoShop with William Blake's etching/watercolour "Ancient of Days". Then added a Color Balance Adjustment layer and a slight vignette.

[Teewinot]

GOAL: Give it a surreal, modern art look.

What I did (in PSP XI):
-Cropped tighter around subject
-Adjusted histogram midtones (-15) for contrast enhancement
-Unsharp mask (radius 75, strength 30) twice
-Desaturated and colorized pinkish hue
-Added 'furry' texture
-Curves adjustment (for a bit more contrast boost)
-Created a mask layer (circle around subject) to add a vignette (chose a darker pink color)
-Added black border

[TerryL]

Fun posts,I enjoyed them

[Jamesc359]

In GIMP
Duplicated the background layer.
Applied a bump map (against itself)
Set the new layer's transparency to 50%.
Brightened and increased the original layer's saturation.

[xxpinballxx]

I really didnt have much of an ide on this one.
I rotated and skewed the dimensions. Then in CS3 used flaming Pears filters kyoto and mr. contrast. Then threw a bit of border around it.
Just more of an abstract now.....

[Nicole]

Ok, so I wanted to have a little bit of fun with this week's WWYD... and so I have 2 fun ones and one serious one (in other words, the last one is what I would really do to the picture if it were mine, and the first two were just fun with post-processing )

Picture 1: Mutant Lake

In case you haven't been following along with all the WWYD threads, this one contains 3 of the WWYD images... I was going to add more, but I couldn't quite figure out where to put a dancing couple in the image. Apologies for mangling some nice images lol



Where to start: With this one, I copied each of the items to a new layer. The lakeI only used a curve preset to turn it to a color negative. The "tentacles" (sorry peeper) I used the selection brush on (not the magic wand one, the other one) and basically just extracted the curvy things. I then transformed it by rotating it so it looked like they were coming out of the water. Because the corners were still visible I used a soft edged brush to erase the corners and make it look like they were coming up out of the water. I selected them and used a hue / saturation adjustment with colorize in order to make them green, and then adjusted the brightness of them. Finally with the tentacles I added a texture that I got from here to give them a bit of extra depth. Now, I debated about where to add the frog. I used the same sort of technique to remove the frog from the background, but also used the background eraser tool. I moved the frog to where I wanted him, decreased the size by about 40% and then erased his feet so it also looked like he was standing in the water. So that was my fun with combining multiple WWYDs

Picture 2: Tentacles

Ok, I already admitted it before, the picture reminded me of tentacles, so here I decided to play with the colors and layers to get a kind of mutant creature look... some would think I'm not quite over Halloween.



For turning out kind of simple, this one had a lot of layers. First layer was the original layer in case I needed to go back. Over that was a solid fill layer of purple. The next layer was the extracted sculpture with the background deleted. This selection was kind of iffy because I used the magnetic lasso and it didn't cooperate very well. The next layer was a Hue / Saturation layer with a mask over the sculpture. I used this to turn just the sculpture green. The next layer was a texture layer for the background. I used the same site as mentioned before. I used a mask so that it only covered the background then set this layer to linear burn. I then used one final layer to add texture to the sculpture. I used a mask to just cover that part and set the layer to Darken. The result is the tentacle creature.

Picture 3: A real edit



Ok, the real reason that I liked this picture was because of the curves. It did give me something fun to play with, but I thought it would only be right to do a nice edit to make up for my 2 fun ones. I really did like the curves of this, but thought it could benefit from being a bit more minimal so that it really stood out. So, I set off editing. I wasn't sure where to start, so I started playing around with the actions I have for PS. First, I used the vevia film technique to bring out the colors and noticed that the sculpture took on a bit of a blue glow. That wasn't quite what I was going for, but I did like the glow. Next I tried the Draganization action. Too dark. But, I liked how it darkened the background. Layers to the rescue. I copied the dark layer over the original layer and set the blending mode to Darken. Some of the areas were too dark though, so I used a layer mask and using a brush with about 50% opacity I erased away some of the darker parts to let it shine a bit more. This was still a little dark, so I duplicated the darker layer again, and set the new layer to color dodge. Because I wanted to background to be black, I went back to the middle layer, the darkest one, and used the clone tool to remove areas of the background that I found distracting.

Phew! That was a lot of edits lol