Replace Color

Good Mood Swing

Date/Time: 4 February 2012, 1:59pm
Location: Nevada City, MT
Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/320
Camera: Canon 60D

Match Color

Forlorn

Date/Time: 4 February 2012, 11:55am
Location: Nevada City, MT
Aperture: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100
Camera: Canon 60D

Portrait Enhancements

Snow Angel

Date/Time: 4 February 2012, 11:51pm
Location: Nevada City, MT
Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/200
Camera: Canon 60D

This has been my favorite assignment this semester. I had a blast going with the group going to Virginia & Nevada Cities in Montana. Good Mood Swing was practically perfect right out of the camera. I made some very minor color tweaks (until the replace color work, of course). Forlorn was horribly overexposed, but her expression and the composition was perfect. Luckily, I had a picture from the same spot, so I matched the color to Yearning For Pa seen in the following post. After the detail came back, the effects of the cold became apparent on her face . . . red nose, veins and goosebumps, so it took some other enhancements to get it finished. Snow Angel was also almost perfect when shot, but there was some blemish removal, color enhancement and a bit of skin smoothing done.

Silo Field

Date/Time: 28 January 2012, 4:31pm
Location: Ashton, ID
Aperture: f9
Shutter Speed: 1/200
Camera: Canon 60D

Sweeping Serenity

Date/Time: 27 January 2012, 5:19pm
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f14
Shutter Speed: 1/250
Camera: Canon 60D

Both of these photos were shot on a tripod in manual mode to more easily preserve the consistency of the exposure. I did some content aware fills to fill in gaps in the skies and to remove an unwanted power box in Sweeping Serenity. I also had some more serious Photoshop work on the tower on the right in Silo Field. The content aware fill did an amazing job, but didn't line some things up right, and bent my poles, so I had to re-do some of that by hand. Otherwise, I was very impressed with the results of my content aware experiments, except for the time that it put snow in the sky . . .

Sunset Stream

Date/Time: 28 January 2012, 5:04pm
Location: Ashton, ID
Aperture: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/1250
Camera: Canon 60D

Evening's Sustenance

Date/Time: 27 January 2012, 5:44pm
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/80
Camera: Canon 60D

Sunset Stream was a beautiful photo to begin with but a bit of Camera RAW enhancement on the JPG file added some depth and vitality to it. I under-exposed the sky, over-exposed the snow and messed with the saturation on sky and water colors.

Evening's Sustenance was shot in RAW. I really wanted to push the colors in the sky more with a vibrance adjustment brush. I also cooled the temperature of the pavement and darkened its exposure and added a subtle vignette.

Rexburg Tropics

Date/Time: 21 January 2012, 12:11pm
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/100
Camera: Canon 60D

Green with Humility

Date/Time: 21 January 2012, 1:05pm
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/125
Camera: Canon 60D

Suspicious Squirrel

Date/Time: 17 January 2012, 5:15pm
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/250
Camera: Canon 60D

Flowers for Hue

Date/Time: 21 January, 2012
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/200
Camera: Canon 60D

My chi must have been in harmony with the wildlife this week. They all seemed to be cooperating with my photographic needs. The squirrel was a bit agitated in Suspicious Squirrel. He started chirping at me and puffed up his tail huge, as you can see. And I took dozens of flower shots at a florist — that's the only place I could find decent-looking plant life at this time of the year. I really liked Green with Humility because it focuses on an unlikely subject. Normally the flowers get all the attention, but I really appreciated the beauty of these bright green flowers-to-be. All of the photos got a bit of color tweaking and a couple got a bit of cropping treatment, but other than that, natural.

Squirrel Surprise

Date/Time: 17 January 2012, 5:12pm
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/200
Camera: Canon 60D
Other: 2 Levels Layers, Saturation Layer

Ezra's Parrot

Date/Time: 21 January 2021, 12:17pm
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/125
Camera: Canon 60D
Other:

I loved that squirrel's expression! Yep, I found more squirrels to shoot. I've got quite the library of squirrel photos now. On the Squirrel Surprise shot I felt like the background was a bit blown out, so I used a levels adjustment layer to darken it a bit and then masked out the squirrel. But then I wanted more light and color on the squirrel so I put levels and saturation adjustment layers on it and masked out the background to highlight the squirrel.

The edits on Ezra's Parrot are a bit more subtle, you may have to look at the enlarged version to really see the difference. The parrot was ever so slightly out of focus, so I used an unsharpen mask smart filter and just highlighted the parts I wanted sharp like his eye, beak and some of his feathers. Since I had to shoot with a high ISO, it was awfully grainy, so I put a blur filter over top and masked out the parrot so it would smooth out some of the grain in the background.

OranGMC

Date/Time: 14 January 2012, 5:09pm
Location: Rigby, ID
Aperture: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/100
Camera: Canon 60D
Other: This is my shallow focus, aperture priority shot.

Pepsi

Date/Time: 16 January 2012, 8:56am
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f29
Shutter Speed: 1/160
Camera: Canon 60D
Other: This is my deep focus, aperture priority shot.

Taco Tractor

Date/Time: 16 January 2012, 8:35am
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/100
Camera: Canon 60D

OranDGE

Date/Time: 16 January 2012, 9:17am
Location: Rexburg, ID
Aperture: f22
Shutter Speed: 1/60
Camera: Canon 60D

Finding orange things in the middle of the winter is tricky. In Idaho, your only choices are basically trucks and tractors. I shot several other orange tractors. I really tried to diversify. All of these images are unaltered except for some color correction on Taco Tractor and Pepsi, cropping on OranGMC, Pepsi, and OranDGE, and I had to remove myself from a reflection in OranGMC.