Ol' Country Road

The other day, I was driving home from Detroit and passed by this field. I have passed by it several times and thought it was amazing. Before the hay could be taken away, I pulled over, grabbed my camera out of my purse and snapped this shot.

I didn't worry too much about getting the perfect composition or lighting because I knew I was going to go home and do some ol' fashioned PhotoShopping. Ever since I purchased Adobe PhotoShop (not the professional version, the one you can get at CostCo for $50) I use it almost everyday. The program can help enhance and fix digital and even scanned photos. By taking a simple image, such as a field, and manipulating over and over, you can learn all sorts of things that the program can do.

The first thing I did was crop the image to make it more visually appealing by using the "Crop" tool. It can be found under the "Image" pulldown menu. There was too much grass in the foreground and I used the closest hay bail on the right to anchor the picture.

Next I changed the photo to black and white by clicking on the "Enhance" pulldown menu and selecting "Convert to Black and White."

Going back to the original color, I enhanced the image by again clicking on the "Enhance" pulldown menu and selecting "Adjust Color" then clicking on "Color Variations." Just by experimenting with all of the color variations, this image was born. It is only slightly different than the original but I think the colors look much brighter.

Another thing that is fun to mess with is the "Hue/Saturation" under the same "Enhance" pulldown menu and under "Color Adjustment." You can adjust the main color in the photograph. This image, for example, is mainly green. By adjusting the hue, I can make the grass look, teal, red, purple, any color.

Filters are another fun way to change photographs; filters can change images to look like drawings, paintings, grainy photographs or just big blurs.
The "Filter Gallery" is under the "Filter" pulldown and there are dozens of different filters that can adjust an image. You can also adjust the degree to which a filter will affect an image, each filter has three different variations that can be manually adjusted.

Happy PhotoShopping!