Diffuse Dorothy

Inspired by James’ work with Arthur and his posies I resolved to take an ostensibly average photo and attempt to emphasize the expression and the attitude I liked in it for an ostensive expression of art and skill. (How often do you get to use those two words back to back? Did I even use them in the correct order? Anyway…)

What I came up with was this irradiated shot of Abigail in her Dorothy dress from last December.

If you are interested, I got this affect using Photoshop in the following way.

• I copied the orig image onto it’s own layer
• Desaturated the top layer
• Masked the areas where I wanted the color to come through (Dress, lips, and eyes. I know, I am such a feminist)
• Some blurring (to take away some grain and bad blurring of the orig photo)
• Then, the coup-de-grace was Diffuse Glow with settings of 0 on grain, 10 on Glow, and 8 on Clear. That is an expert way of saying that I hacked and monkeyed around with the settings until I got the look that I wanted. Very bright highlights with little loss of detail.
• Then I applied that to both layers and the mask itself with knocked down the colors rather nicely.

All that ‘desaturation-diffuse-glowing-photoshop-mumbojumbo’ and I still think it doesn’t hold a candle to the natural ability of James and his Picasa. He seems to have a feel for what looks good and I am getting lost in some pretty unintelligible numbers.

I would say we should have a photo Tech-night sometime where we spend a lot of time manipulating photos and goofing with the art that computers allow but that STILL won’t get the point across, just getting the subject to express itself through minimal application of the appropriate manipulation that covers the feeling of the shot. Hmph.

One more thing, if you want to take a look at an exceptional photography site check out www.photo.net. Excellent artists with ‘Photoshopped’ and natural photographs from a wide gamut of photographers. Be aware that there are occasional nude/semi-nude photographs on this site.