Category Archives

Monthly Archives


Subscribe to the blog by Email

Behind the Camera


I'm a volunteer with

I Heart Faces: Fix It Friday

August 13th, 2010

So often people ogle over my camera thinking they could take better pictures with a better camera. Don’t tell but my camera isn’t a Nikon on Canon. Shhhhh.
What they don’t realize is how much post-processing plays into the making of a great finished product.

Take this weeks’ Fix It photo for example.

fixit66

Cute kid. Check. Sharp focus. Check. Compostion. Oops. There is also a the shoulder of a brother or a friend who didn’t quite make the cut.

My first thought was to crop the photo vertically. Like this.

fixit66-edit

I proceeded to use auto level in GIMP which brightened the colors but left a weird green hue. I went ahead and bumped the slider for the red channel to 1.08. Much better. A little extra sparkle for the eyes and a slight vignette finished off the look. I liked it but wanted to stretch myself to see if I could make it work as a horizontal picture.

The subject is looking slightly right so I wented him in the left third of the picture. I couldn’t just crop it that way because I would lose too much of the shirt. I decided to expand the canvas on the right about 200 pixels. I cut out feathered pieces of the uncluttered background on the left, flipped them horizontally, and used them to fill in the space I needed on the right. A little smudging to hide the seams and VOILA!

fixit66-edita

I actually did the same color adjustment and eye touch up that I did in the vertical fix after I got the background right.

The background seemed a little plain so I through in a little bokeh. It’s just an overlay from a texture I found on Flickr.

fixit66-editb

So there you have it. Proof that post-editing is half (or more) of the battle. All my post-editing was done in GIMP which is free for anyone. So go ahead and try it for yourself.  Happy Editing!