Controlling the look and feel of an image in post production.

Sometimes, the photos we take are a little disappointing…even when composed perfectly, the lighting and colors just right, the subject looking just so…
What’s missing?  What we were feeling at the time…the image may not be as punchy or dreamlike as we thought it should be…maybe it is just too lifelike – when what we want is more ‘mood’.

Photoshop and its plugin environment have taken a bad rap for altering reality in the commercial world.  But for artistic work, we aren’t necessarily after reality.

This image from Saturday’s macro workshop has been punched up in a couple of plugins and cropped to a square format.  I’m not talking about making the wasp thinner or masking lines on its face, smoothing skin tones!…nothing has been changed in the ‘shape’ of the thing…but the colors are punched, contrast increased, the edges darkened to focus attention on the subject etc.

To me it is more ‘wasp’ than the original.  And as artists we create to suit ourselves…

I’ll be holding a workshop over the summer to demonstrate what can be achieved in post production – to give an idea of the creative control we have over an image.  The post production environment can be expensive – but doesn’t have to be.  This workshop will give you a chance to play with software and see if any of it is useful for you…

(Click on the image to see it larger)