Please help with editing the photo

[Marija]

Hi all!
this is one of my first photos I've taken. I knew nothing, and I mean nothing about photography then. I like it, and I want to keep it, but there are some things wrong with this photo, I know... As I recall, I just put the signature in and cropped it a little bit.
I posted this photo in October, in Macro critique section, and the photo had quite a few responses. I've just saw that someone critiqued the photo again, yesterday. Thanks! It reminded me not to forget about it! Here is the thread http://digital-photography-school.co...lle-snail.html
It was suggested to me that I should apply the rule of thirds, and I can do that, but I can't (I don't know how) fix this white part of the sky. Don't have Ideas, don't have skills...
Could someone try to fix this photo, show me and explain! I would really want to save this photo!
Thanks a lot in advance!

[edbayani]

hi marija, i just used the paint brush and painted the white sky using alternately soft and hard brush depending on the edges and also varied the opacity while brushing. after painting all the edges, i then painted the inside areas and it became a solid even light blue. i then painted over the even blue with white using a soft brush with .5% opacity and brushed the white clouds, varying the size of the brush by pressing [ and ] to make the brush bigger or smaller.
because of the low opacity, you have to paint about 3 times each area depending on the whiteness that you want. i also used the quick mask using the sharpest brush to select the snail and used the unsharp mask to sharpen the snail a bit. just be very carefull when brushing the blue when near the edges so you don't have fringing on the edges.
i hope this can help you. there are other ways but i think this is the easiest.

[edbayani]

here is another one. if you find it hard to paint the sky, you can drag an image of a sky and drag it over your snail photo. reduce the opacity so you can adjust the placement and size of clouds using free transform. then make it 100% opacity again and make a layer mask and with the brush, brush away everything to show the image of the snail. then toggle the bg color to white and brush back the clouds and sky varying your brush size and sharpness. use about 40% opacity when brushing back the sky. flatten and save. if you want you can use the sharpen tool at 40% and brush lightly the snail to sharpen it.

[mandyatm]

The easiest way i have found to change the sky is to do as the above poster mentioned by placing sky from a different picture on top and removing it off the picture where you want it (using layer masks). But reduce the opacity so it doesn't look fake. There are other ways to do it by adding gradients and such.

For the crop, there are some natural lines in this pic which could be used for the rule of thirds. The stem on the left can be placed on the left "third" and the leaf behind the snail can be placed along the bottom "third." So you would be cropping some off the right side and the bottom. I am on my laptop right now so I can't crop it for you, but will try to help more later. I really like the pic.

[LoveDSLR]

Originally Posted by Marija

It was suggested to me that I should apply the rule of thirds, and I can do that...

You may want to consider Golden Spiral instead since you are not trying to balance various elements in the photo,

[Marija]

Thank you all for taking the time to help me!

edbayani, I was hoping for your editing, since you're great at it. I'll choose the second method and now I have to find a photo with a proper sky. If I have the time I'll take a photo today after work (yes I'm using my work time for DPS, right now ) because it's overcast, similar to day when this photo was taken.

mandyatm, I'm looking forward to see the way you would crop the photo.

LoveDSLR, if I do the Golden Spiral I'll lose the stem and the leaves, and without them in the picture I'll have just one snail without the story...The stem and the leaves show his precarious position, the amount of the leaf he ate (I had to be very careful when I was taking photos of him since he was really eating the leaf...that was interesting to watch) I think that they, along with the snail make this photo interesting and funny perhaps... Maybe you could suggest me the rule of thirds which incorporates all this elements.

[LoveDSLR]

Originally Posted by Marija

Maybe you could suggest me the rule of thirds which incorporates all this elements.

[Marija]

Thank you a lot!
And uh, difficult for me... will I ever learn.....

[LoveDSLR]

Originally Posted by Marija

Thank you a lot!
And uh, difficult for me... will I ever learn.....

Rule of thirds:



The first one is about arranging the various elements and the second one is about placement of the top left intersection (power point).

Here's a tutorial on golden section Divine proportion the easy way - golden section Photoshop plugin.

[edbayani]

glad to be of help, marija. anytime. just a suggestion in cropping, following the rule of thirds, if you could tilt (rotate) the image a little bit clockwise so the stem wouldn't be too parallel to the edge to give it more tension. just my thought.