While Instagram is my social media of choice, I've never been that into it for the photography purpose, but more of the social purpose. So, I never really edit my photos of my friends and I because it feels unnatural with how little seriousness I generally put into my posts, and I never really knew how to do it well. Class this week gave me an excuse to finally learn, and now I'm unsure why I haven't been doing this all along because of how easy editing my photos was, and how much better I could make them look!
We're looking at raster-images, which are essentially grids of pixels (AKA picture elements) that together form complete images.
The photos that I edited were originally in my visual scavenger hunt slideshow in my previous post. These all had a resolution of 4032 x 3024 pixels which totals to be 12.2 megapixels, the total possible from my iPhone camera.
I edited using Pixlr E, a free website that I'd never used before this assignment, but I was really happy with it! It had a similar interface as Adobe Photoshop, but was across the board easy-to-use and high functioning.
This was one of my favorite images before and after being edited. The editing wasn't too extensive for this one because I loved the original look, but I think I managed to enhance it a bit. First I cropped the image, just slightly, to get the composition I wanted using the rule of thirds to have the focused leaf in a spot that would draw the eye.
I liked the overall exposure, but decided to increase the contrast a bit to get the leaves to pop a bit more. I also played with the levels to bring out shadows a bit more as well as the highlights to get the curved shape of the leaves in all their glory. With the color, I wanted the image to stay pretty natural, but I increased the vibrancy slightly to really get the color of the leaves to pop out.
I thought that less was more for this photo and was happy with what those small edits were able to accomplish. After that I just resized the image to 1000 x 750 pixels to optimize the resolution for viewing on a computer screen, and saved it!
This image surprised me by being one of my favorites at the end! These are bolts on a bridge that goes over the river on campus and I took the photo because I liked the symmetry of, not only the bolts, but the snow on them too. The edit with this one is what really made me notice it.
When playing with the exposure, I lowered the brightness a bit to really bring out the pattern and show the detail of the snow and ice in the background. I also brought out the shadows in this one a bit.
After playing with the saturation and vibrancy, I couldn't get to a place where I was happy with the color. On a whim I decided to put a black and white filter on it and everything changed. I think this photo was just meant to be in black and white. Not only does it make the pattern and symmetry of the bridge clear and simplified, but it brings out the detail in the ice and makes the trees in the background look like nicely silhouetted texture. I like how the background's lack of perfect symmetry compares with the bridges symmetry, while both have beauty. It kind of juxtaposes man-made art with natural art.
I did not crop this image because I thought it was composed nicely, but resized it like the other and am very happy with the results.
Now that I've learned the basics of photo editing, I might be an addict. I love the way these turned out and never thought I'd be able to make photographs like these with just my phone.
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