Faking It

When it´s raining, which it´s done practically non-stop for the past few days, it´s frustrating when I can´t spend any time in my garden, especially at this time of year when so many plants are beginning to burst into bloom. The next best thing is to look through my photos. I often think that the most interesting part of photography is the – for me inevitable - editing in Photoshop. Well, at least by constantly telling myself this it goes some way to compensating me for the fact that if I´m not a great photographer at least I can usually improve on my under/over exposed blunders. It really is about time that I at least attempted to master the mysteries of HDR but I´m far too spontaneous (or lazy) to be bothered setting up a tripod (assuming I actually had one) and taking 3 almost identical photos by which time my favourite subject, namely Dora, has already stopped doing whatever it was I wanted to capture. Besides, I tell myself that so far I´ve managed pretty well with just one photo and a little help from PS. Usually I find that the auto features do most of the work for me or, failing that, I can always fall back on Curves, my favourite standby for bland pics with little contrast. But sometimes it seems that nothing works and that´s when I start experimenting. Now this is a really good idea for 2 reasons. First of all it distracts me from the pile of unironed laundry toppling over in the room next to my workroom feebly calling my name and secondly it sometimes actually works! However, it has its downside. I get so totally carried away with trial and error that when I eventually discover, usually quite by accident, a technique that transforms a bland photo into a little work of art, it´s taken so long that I´ve totally forgotten exactly what I did to achieve this and I´ve completely exhausted the History function which has given up in despair at about the 30^th step. Well, I´ve learned my lesson from that. Nowadays before I start experimenting I give my project a name and start recording it as an action. If it doesn´t work I simply delete it and start a new action. In this particular case I optimistically called my experiment Faux HDR. I say “optimistically” because I really had very little idea how to do this. I´ll draw a veil over the following 3 hours or so and show you what I eventually came up with.

This is a photo, not of my garden but of part of a hotel in Domburg. This hotel is in a style I call Loco Rococo and has had all kinds of highly romantic and whimsical bits added on to it since it was first built which was probably around the time that the Brothers Grimm were writing their fairy tales. My favourite feature is this tower from which I can easily imagine Rapunzel letting down her hair. It´s probably lucky that I always rent a cottage while I´m in Domburg because I know that if I lived in that tower room I´d spend the entire 3 weeks just dreamily gazing out of the windows - and growing my hair. The original unedited photo is flat and boring to say the least and has none of the subject´s magical quality. The second one I personally feel has a definite WOW effect with lots of detail and a wonderfully over the top sunny summer sky, the kind of sky which you could only see if you were magically transported into one of those above-mentioned fairy tales.
(These are all a lot smaller than I´d like them to be but if you´re at all interested you can view a larger size by clicking on them.)

 

The next photo is one of my favourites of Dora simply because it always makes me laugh. Again the original is bland and boring, something that Dora definitely isn´t. I thought that this one deserved a completely over the top treatment to go with the subject so after my Faux HDR I went several steps further by increasing the saturation, intensifying the contrast with Curves and then adding the Dry Brush artistic filter to produce an almost cartoon effect.

The following is a photo of an absolutely stunningly coloured duck which I took one autumn when we spent a weekend at an apartment complex in Domburg. Just about everything with feathers used to waddle around on our patio every morning begging for breakfast leftovers. This gaudy fellow deserved some special treatment to bring out his magnificent colours. First of all I removed all trace of his wife´s tail feathers and gave him the Faux HDR treatment plus a dash of my favourite Curves for more contrast. In the third version I added some texture and definition using the Poster Edges filter. Gorgeous, isn´t he?

Now to my garden...Last year I laid a “wild flower carpet” next to some rose bushes at the side of the house. I love these sheets of seeds because I never know what will appear. The answer to that is lots of different wild flowers including a spectacularly coloured perennial mallow. The original unedited photo just didn´t do it justice. The Faux HDR and Curves made it far more vibrant and finally the addition of the Smudge Stick filter darkened and intensified the colour.

Last year I had pots of pansies, marigolds, purple verbena and a very pretty daisy-like flower which I still haven´t identified on the wrought iron table on my patio. I went a bit overboard with plants last year and some also had to sit on the matching bench. (No great loss as it´s more decorative than functional. Give me a padded recliner any day.) The original was all that a flower photo shouldn´t be so I´ll hastily skip to the edited version. As usual, after the Faux HDR effect I went several steps further with, yet again, Curves. Then I added the Poster Edges filter which heightened the various textures marvellously, not only of the flowers but also the wrought iron and the wood.

 

Now the ugliest plant in the world spends the summer looking hideous in the far corner of the patio and hibernates in my living room all winter taking up an amazing amount of space which normally it wouldn´t deserve BUT for the fact that for just a few weeks every summer its lethal prickles are adorned by the most spectacular blossoms ever. Imagine a little Christmas cactus and multiply by a thousand...It´s the only one of my experiments that deserves 4 versions. I´ll rush through them quickly. The original is pretty but boring. The second has the usual Faux HDR plus – guess what – right, Curves then Poster Edges. Ditto the third with a slight alteration of the Poster Edges values. In the last one I did almost exactly the same but with the addition of HDR Toning. I don´t care much for the presets so I experimented and this is what I came up with. I think I like it best as the colours are more natural.

Last but not least a far earthier subject and a less than pretty one compared with the flowers. Last year a friend brought us some organic potatoes from a nearby farm and they were so delicious we kept a couple back, buried them in the vegetable plot behind the hut and, out of sight, out of mind, completely forgot about them until Herbert noticed their wilting leaves and dug them up in September. The colour in the original photo is entirely accurate including the colour of the soil adhering to them but boring, boring. The second version (Faux HDR, Curves;Poster Edges) I like a lot because it has an almost 3D look to it and the colours and shapes reflected in the dimpled glass patio table have a nice abstract textured look. The third version is more like a painting than anything else and although no potato was ever that colour it still has the essence of a potato and, again, I really like the reflected colours and textures. For this one I used the usual 2 effects plus another HDR Toning. It took a lot of experimenting but I´m really happy with the result.

The purists among you will no doubt say that most of this, maybe with the exception of the tower though even that´s fairly OTT, has got very little to do with photo editing as such and you´d probably be right. Many of these experiments look nothing like a photo but I think that many of them capture something that the camera – in my hands anyway! - has failed to capture and that is the spirit of the subject be it comical and carefree in the case of Dotty Dora or brightly coloured and totally unassuming in the case of the duck.

Right now. Experiment over. It´s time to read up on real HDR without the cartoon effects. What a bore. I think I´ll tackle that pile of ironing first.