Fading Glory

The grandstand at the local park burnt down, and I decided to make a little tribute to it in my own way.



It started with this photo:

This is what the scene looked like a couple days ago. Clean up crews were still there.



This is how it used to look. The grandstand overlooking the football field and running track.


My plan was to take the old photo, make it look old (sepia tones help here) and make it fade into the new photo. After doing my best to carefully line up the 2 pictures (the trees in the background helped) I then faded out the old photo with a gradient. The 2 white "blobs" near the upper right of this picture are where the trees didn't quite line up, and I erased them from this photo just to clean it up a bit.


Now I layered these pictures on top of each other and got the desired effect!

The Lovebird

I've been taking a lot of walks through the local park lately. In the park live a large group of ducks, a few geese and one swan. I took my camera on one of these recent trips. I saw this couple approach the swan as I walked past. I sneakily took this picture:



It is a nice picture, but it would be more interesting if the swan was a bit more, visible, at least, if you could see its head. Luckily I also had a picture like that.



I cut around the bird in the 2nd picture and pasted it over top of the bird in the first. Blending the grass wasn't too much of a challenge and I tried fixing the shadows the best I could.


I didn't like the way the grass looked however. Someone (probably groundskeepers) had driven on the grass and left some tire treads and made those brown marks. I wanted to make them look a little less obvious at least. So some patching and clone stamping brought me to this:


Then I noticed the stone structure dead center in the background. I believe it holds a plaque. I decided to get rid of it and darken the background a bit.


Just as an experiment I decided to try liven up the color of the grass a bit. I think I went a bit too far but here it is:

Quiet Companion 2

Quiet Companion 2 - Unedited
Originally uploaded by BadOmen.

My friend Anne came for a visit a couple weeks ago. While she was here, my (now-ex) room-mate Glenn, Anne and I took a trip to the local cemetary. It was a gorgeous, sunny day. I took lots of pictures, and revisited this angel statue from my last trip. With some new ideas, I took this shot. There was a certain look I was after however.

So after some tweaking with the contrast, desaturating the picture (removing the color) and painting out a little bit of the cross behind her we have the final product. The hardest part was getting the background as dark as I wanted (even after underexposing the picture a bit) - like I said it was a bright sunny day.

Concentrating

Concentrating B
Originally uploaded by BadOmen.

I did a lot of work on this photo and I thought it might be interesting for people to see exactly what I did. There are actually 2 versions of this, this being the original one I did. I was really happy with this one too, however I noticed something after I was all done - there is a reflection in the eyeglasses. I looked at it carefully and it would be VERY hard to get that out, so I decided a 2nd version was in order and I'd change the background to match more closely the reflection.



Here's the original of the photo. Notice the background. It's actually my mortarboard from when I graduated high school, hanging on something. Now it's out of focus, and the background fades away nicely, but I really wanted the focus to be on Glenn's face. So the background had to go. I tried various ways of lightening it up, but it ended up looking TOO unnatural. Eventually I settled for painting the background an off-white color completely. This still didn't look right of course. I wanted there to be some texture to the background, it'd look too fake without it.

I used splatter brushes (basically paint brushes in the editing program that are in the shape of a paint or blood splatter) with a darker color to make botches and blobs in the background. The sharp edges of these wouldn't look right, so I selected everything that was the background and gave it a nice lens blur.

After all that was done, it was still a little too plain for me, so I cut out a piece of this picture:, notably the base of the bridge. I took that and put it over top of the rest of the picture, and then lowered the opacity until it blended right. I may have even "erased" the edge of it slightly so it would blend in better.

The final step was to give the picture that "Kevin" feeling, kind of a washed out, unnatural look. This was done by created a new layer based on the original image, desaturating it (removing the color) then using a layer blending technique (I believe it was "Soft Light").

It was at this point that I realized there was a reflection in his glasses. So I followed the steps from before more or less but instead of the bridge used this picture: as the background. I blurred them a bit less so they were still recognizable.

The end result was of course this:

.

And there you have it.

Neighborhood

Neighborhood
Originally uploaded by BadOmen.

So popping up a lot recently is a depth of field trick that makes things look like they are minatures. I was curious to try it. It won't work on every picture.

On this one I upped the saturation of the colors then added the lens blur. The saturation helps everything look artificial. The blur is the trick. Done right you get results like this. I am quite happy with how it looks.


Here's a link to the unedited version.

Post - Edited

Post - Edited
Originally uploaded by BadOmen.

I was in Kamloops on the weekend. Downtown there is this foot bridge that goes from the main street down to the riverfront park. These light posts were on the bridge. The yellow bits in the background are parts of the bridge construction.

The saturation of the picture was increased so make the colors more vibrant. I had a few more changes too, see the original picture below.

Post - Original

Post - Original
Originally uploaded by BadOmen.

Here is the original version of the picture. As you can see the color is kind of dull and there are little bits that kept the picture from looking "clean" that I removed.