BirdHouseEditing


 * Jenn Brower's Photo Editing**

I love taking digital photographs with my Canon PowerShot SD1000. It takes great pictures, but I often run them through my photo editing software, Microsoft Digital Image Pro9. There are a LOT of things I could do with this software, but sadly enough, I really only crop, fix red-eye, and run levels auto-fix. I just have not taken the time to test out the many possibilities, so I was really looking forward to this assignment!

I used this software to resize all of my photos. I have the quality turned up pretty high (2400 x 1800 on most photos) since I have both the card space, AND I never know when I'll get a perfect picture of Natalie to print and share. I did use the crop feature on some of the photos in order to focus on the bird house rather than unnecssary background images.

Once those boring things were out of the way, I started to play! Here is an original photo...

If you recall, I had the "Color Accent" option running, but otherwise this photo is untouched. Well, I wanted to see how the many "Effect" options wold work, so I started clicking. I found the "Negative" option to give the photo a very ominous feel! What were nice, fluffly looking clouds are now dark and stormy looking. It's almost like a shot used in a bad scary movie! *L*

Now, remember my "Bird's Eye" view of the house? Well, I didn't like that Natalie's swing was in the shot, so I first used a "Clone Brush" to make it "disappear". It took a little work to get the shadows to line up just right, but I think it worked out pretty well. Ta Da!

Next I tried the "Diffuse Glow" effect. I wanted a softer, almost chalk-drawn look to it. I experimented with the transparency, graininess, and intensity of the photo until I liked what I saw.

Finally, I was thinking about doing some "remodeling" of this plain little bird house. What do you think?? Ok...this might not be my best "paint" job, but it is fun to see what it would look like as a different color. I used the "color tint" option and increased the intensity to get the eye-catching red.

Well, I could play with this forever, but I think this will have to do for now. I hope you enjoyed what I tried out!