This is a REALLY cool place. Just south of Page, Az is a turnoff to Horseshoe Bend. This is what you’ll see after a 15 minute hike to the edge of the canyon. The photo is 1280 pixels wide so you’ll need to click on the image to see it full size.
Click Here to see the full size image.
These are photos of Sedona, Arizona that I took recently. Most of the shots are from Oak Creek. It snowed a few days before I was there and the landscape was covered just enough to make the photos more interesting.
Click on the thumbnail images to see the full size shots. The 5th photo actually started out as three separate photos that I stitched together in Photoshop. Click the image below to see the original three shots. Then click the 5th photo in the gallery to see the finished version.
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.
