Photoshop

Blog Week Day 3: Experimental Photography 5KCBWDAY3

Experimental Photography And Image Handling For Bloggers: Refresh your skills at creating attention-grabbing pictures.

For today’s Blog Week topic, I decided to tackle some photo editing.

Below is one of the original, unedited pictures I took of my Morgandy Mittens pattern. I love, love, love the mittens, but I never really felt like the pictures showed them off to their best advantage.

Original

As you can see, the color of the mittens looks kind of washed out and flat, and the yellow table background is distracting. The actual yarn (Manos Silk Blend in Bing Cherry) is a luminous, multi-toned purple-red color. Not flat at all!

I went looking for an accurate depiction of it somewhere online and had a lot of trouble finding one. Looks like I’m not the only one whose camera has trouble with reds! This picture, from retailer Eat.Sleep.Knit., is the closest one I found:

First, I tried my quick and dirty method of photo editing: using the tools in iPhoto to tweak exposure, colors, and contrast. After a few minutes, it looked slightly better:

with iPhoto treatment

Also kind of fluorescent. Not the best look. So I imported the photo into Photoshop to try some more powerful tools. I’m not great with Photoshop, and I only know how to use about 5% of the things it can do, but sometimes I can get good results by messing around for a while to see what looks good.

Here’s the result of tweaking levels and selective color on the original photo:

with Photoshop treatment

Maybe a little better… but still not great (although we’re getting closer to the actual color, so that’s good).

Now I decided to pull out the big guns. One of the best things I discovered a few years ago was Photoshop Actions. These are sequences of layers and filters that people put together to create certain effects and then put up online for free or sale. You click one button and everything gets applied to your original photo, and then you can adjust the layers to get the exact look you want. (I gushed about Actions in this blog post if you want to read more about them.)

Some of the actions I have obviously weren’t going to work for this picture (like the ones to bump up the reds), but I found several that I liked! All the actions below are from the Timecapsule Set by Nelly Nero.

with “Woodstock” action – I like the vintage-y look!

With “Milk” action

And my favorite of the bunch:

with “Mandolin” action

The colors are very close to the actual mittens and the yarn no longer looks flat and dull. Plus, I think the cables show up a lot better than they did in the original.

I’m calling this one a win!

Knitting and Crochet Blog Week: Photography Challenge

Day 2: Photography Challenge

Swatch color wheel (note all the green):

Leftovers color wheel (lots more reds, blues, and whites in this one):

TILT: Photoshop Actions!

Thing I Love Today: Downloadable Photoshop Actions!

How did I not even know this tool existed? You can download (free, mostly!) sequences of layers and filters that automatically apply themselves to photos… and they come out AWESOME. I can do basic stuff in Photoshop (lighten, darken, blur backgrounds, change saturation, that kind of thing), but these tricks are way beyond me. Being able to drastically alter the mood of a photo by clicking one button is huge.

I’ve been messing with the photos of my new sweater (see last post for details on the sweater). Here are some examples, using my favorite set of actions so far, the Timecapsule Set by Nelly Nero (I found the download here):

Original photo

with Warm Up action

with Summer of '69 action

with City Chic action – I have never looked cooler in my life

Of course, I immediately want to go through my entire photo collection and futz with every one, haha. Such is the danger of learning new Photoshop tricks. But I think the challenge will be to keep the effects subtle. The timing on figuring this out is really good, though… I will be releasing a new hat and mitten set in about a week that has a very vintage-y feel, so some of the actions are going to work really well for those photos!

Stay tuned…