Tina has challenged us to practice changing up our photos for #Lens-Artist Photo Challenge #134. I’m not an expert artist any more than I am a photographer, but just as I did with my dad, I can spend hours fiddling in the “darkroom.”
Car show season will be coming up soon in California, if the COVID restrictions are lifted. With a little help from Photoshop Elements 15, or the filters in your camera, you can turn your pictures from ordinary to stellar. What programs do you use to improve your photos?
Vince and I used to love go go to car shows. Hosting one in Woodlake was lots of fun, too. However, as many photos as I took, I wasn’t thrilled with any of them. I loved this car, but I couldn’t separate it from the cars around it and still photograph the whole car.
So, I brought the photo into Photoshop Elements 15, for simple photographers like I am, and made some Guided Fun Edits experimenting with the shape of the blobs, the texture and finally added an effect. Then I cropped it and added a frame resulting in this finished picture. I think it looks romantic.
I love old cars and trucks, and I put a little too much of myself into this next photo. First, the fingerprint at the top and the shadow on the bottom. Since the photograph didn’t showcase the entire truck anyway, I cropped it to death and added a frame and a signature. There was a little too much of another truck admirer as well. 🙂 Notice I didn’t have to deal with tires. This one looks like it is floating on the grass.
After a few little cuts, the flaws faded into the woodwork.
This last picture was my favorite because it included a natural frame of leaves and limbs. But the problem was still too many cars and too many people who didn’t add interest to this fire-engine red beauty.
I played with this one in several ways. I had never tried the radical bursts in the Fun Edits, but I liked the way it came out – sort of.
This first picture had a bit more blurring of the car than I wanted, and somehow I did not notice that my name floated up almost into the car itself. So I brought back the original photo and added more focus and less blur. I added the red frame first then the black so it did not disappear as the first one did. I copied the color from the old license plate for my name. What do all of you do for your signatures?
I still was not done playing with it, though. In Photoshop you can experiment with filters until the wee hours of the morning and you realize that you have someplace to be at 7:30 in the morning, so you’d better stop. That’s where I was tonight. Nonetheless, I still played with a few filters. I like the Fresco Filter because it gave the car a comic book look.
Thanks for joining me today. Please visit some other participants by going to Tina’s website and looking at the comments.
Coming Up
- #WQWWC – Frank will be hosting the topic of Love at his beach site. It will be posted on Tuesday, so you can link to his blog, and we will both visit you. It’s still not too late to link your posts about respect to #WQWWC this week. Instructions are on the post.
- #Story Chat in January, “A Postcard from the Past” by Anne Goodwin went so well that there were a record number of comments to summarize and categorize. Thank you all so much!
- Tuesday the February Story Chat short story, ‘Trophy Cabinet” by Geoff LePard come out! If you look on his website, you’ll see that he has about 13 books published. So, if you don’t know him this is your chance to get acquainted. Leave a comment, and it
mightjustwill show up in the Story Chat Summary/Follow-up. 🙂 - Sue Vincent Rodeo Classic. We have until February 11 to complete the first challenge and to make a donation to help Sue as she is suffering (you wouldn’t know it from chatting with her) but she is dealing with a terminal cancer, and we bloggers have been called on to make a difference.
Have a great week, my friends. See you soon on your blog, various challenges and hopefully here as well.
Marsha Ingrao - Always Write 
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