Yesterday I was digging through the catalogue of photos I've taken of Liverpool down the years, and I realized that although many of them were great shots, most were taken on an old smart phone with a less than decent camera.
So I decided to try using various editing techniques I've learned down the years making title pictures for hive posts.
All images are enhanced using GIMP photo editing software which can be downloaded at that link. It is like a poor man's photoshop ð
Speke Hall
Sits near to the banks of the river Mersey, around 12 km from the city center. It is a Tudor wooden beam manor house that is well worth a visit on a sunny day.
My original photo was lackluster, lacking definition and vibrancy of colour.
To enhance this picture (the title image above) I made a bunch of changes to bring out the colours in the sky, create contrast and bring the focus to the building as the subject.
I adjusted colour levels to the base image before using the fuzzy select tool to select only the sky, then after making a new layer and mask, adjusted only the sky area to bring out the blue. Then I used the 'shadows and highlights' colour tool to sharpen the contrast between the building, foliage, lawn and sky area.
To really bring the hall into focus I made a foreground and background layer, then edited the foreground layer using 'foreground selection' tool. I drew around the building in the photo, then painted in the whole area of the building in detail before adding a layer mask before highlighting the 'background layer' and desaturating the colour in the background.
The image at this point looked pretty good, and I'm not 100% certain if I shoudln't have stopped at the midway point. What do you think? Check out the gif slideshow below and let me know in the comments.
Finally, I added a very low amount of highpass filter to the image by duplicating the layer, then finding highpass in the filters/enhance menu and adjusting the value very slightly to bring out the detail of the larger objects.
It has been ages since I've done any photo editing to this level so I reverted to this YouTube tutorial to jog my memory ð All of the techniques I have mentioned here are explained in the tutorial above by Davies Media Design.
The Banks of the Mersey - A Double Rainbow Before Sunset
These two final pictures needed a lot less editing to improve them.
In the first I played with the colour levels in the whole picture, finally deciding to isolate the rainbow to it's own layer with the 'paths tool', then play with the colour settings in that layer only to make the rainbow more prominent.
In the photo of the sunset I used the 'fuzzy select' tool to highlight the sun, clouds and river before using 'hue-saturation' to adjust the yellow and red colour spectrums to enhance the impact of the sunset.
Origonal Left/Enhanced Right
The effect of the edits were much more subtle in these pictures, and there was less I could do as they were taken on an old smart phone that had a pretty shoddy camera...
Origonal Left/Enhanced Right
but you know what they say...
God loves a trier ð€£
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