Photographic manipulation – A Photo's Worth

This week Bren challenged me to use processing magic in my photographs. I am particularly pleased with this push to use more of the features in my Adobe Lightroom Classic software. It has been a while since I left my college classes. I enjoy photography, and I have gotten comfortable with my camera. I must say that I often rely on the same settings and processing steps. So I want to thank Bren for showing me what I have been missing. Now I know what masking and clarity can do for my images.

There are so many advances to this program. Today it was fun to try using masking to either bring down the clarity or increase clarity to highlight the subject. This technique can be applied to flowers, landscapes, and architecture. Lowering the clarity and creating softness in those areas frames the subject in an image, be it a tree, path, bridge, even a door or house, or just a dreamy-looking image.

In these photographs the difference is subtle

Along with changing the clarity I also changed the background lighting

My pareidolia is playing tricks again. Can you see what I see in the following photograph?

With this technique, I am able to improve my photographs.. But mostly I use i my macro lens or I choose a large aperture to decrease my depth of field and try and set my subject apart from the background.

I hope that you enjoyed my blog post, and again thanks Lens-Artists.

This week Tracy challenged me to present my photographs representing the surreal.

When I retired from teaching I enrolled in many local community college classes here in Sacramento to improve my Adobe software knowledge and improve my digital photography. At that time Photoshop CS2 had just been released, and I had just upgraded from Photoshop 5. Class assignments helped push me out of my comfort zone. I found some examples of surrealism from my work at that time.