Mike Huber

One of the things you can do in Photoshop is to take a photo and add a filter to the final image. One of the more popular filters is blurring. Use the blurring tool to give your image a soft focus look.

Here are some of my favorite filters in use.  The first two photos are of the Yellowstone River in Montana.  The color image is the original cropped image and the second is a black and white using the ‘graphic pen’ filter.  This gives the image a ’sketched’ look.

The second set is also of the Yellowstone and uses the Artistic cutout filter.  This gives the image almost a comic book look.

The third set uses the diffuse glow tool.

The last photo uses the neon glow filter.

All of these filters can be adjusted in various ways to achieve the desired effect.

I’ve been involved in photography a long time.  Such a long time, in fact, that I can still remember using a darkroom to tweak a photo.  Digital photos are so much easier to manipulate.

Like me, I’m sure you have many digital photos that look washed out, dull and flat.  The colors aren’t what you remembered when you took the photo and photo just seems lifeless.  Photoshop and other editing programs can help you render these kinds of photos  into ones that you would be proud to show on your site.

Let me show you an example.  The first photo is the original.  The only thing I did was size it to fit this page.  The second photo is this same photo manipulated in Photoshop.  Which one do you like better?

Grand Canyon photo before Photoshop.

This same photo after a digital darkroom session.

Here’s an interesting photo of Taliesin West, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed school and studio. The photo is actually 5 photos that have been stitched together using Photoshop. It had rained the previous day and cleared the air and the clouds cooperated for a nice background. Photoshop does a good job of blending a number of pictures together for a panoramic. The 5 shots were taken with a tripod.

Click on the photo to see it full size.

I put together a couple more HDR photos (high dynamic range). These are a couple of shots from around the house.  I posted the best exposure one-shot followed by the HDR photo.

Single Shot

HDR Photo

HDR photography takes multiple photos of the same scence shot at different f-stops and combines all of them into one photo. You can do this with PhotoShop and other programs. The results are very interesting. As you have three shots of the same scene with different lighting, the HDR allows you to take the highlights and shadows from each and include them in your final shot. See the images below….what fun…Click on the image to see them in ‘full size’…