Texture application

Here is an example of taking a poor photo and dressing it up with some judicious cropping and application of texture.  The image on the right was taken at dusk using a point-and-shoot camera.  The colors are muted and there is a lot of noise in the photo due to the low light conditions.  I cropped to move the boat out of the exact center of the frame, and to use the cluster of flowers on the left as a balance.  There was not much tonal variety in the original shot, and the application of texture, while warming the image, did not improve the tonality.  I really liked the dark moodiness of the edited photo, but the boat was pretty much lost in the background so I applied a mask to increase the level and bring it up a little, and also added a slight warming tone over just the boat.  It helped separate the boat from the background without totally spoiling the mood. You can see a larger version of the final processed image here. The other version is a watercolor conversion of the same image, just to see how it would be different.  I like it, but it loses some of the dark spookiness.

PR shots demonstrate crop and texture

Original Shot unedited

Final Shot

Here is a sample of a PR image taken for Brian Muller, local bluegrass and jazz musician.  Two processes were performed on the original shot.  First, the image was cropped to convert the original digital frame to an 8" x 10" format for use in promotions and to tighten the focus on the musician.  The shots in the studio are generally left a little wide so that I can crop to suit during post-production.  Second, I added a little texture overlay to the image which warmed it slightly and created a little more flatness while simultaneously smoothing and vignetting the backdrop.  There is a slight loss of contrast in the result, but for printing purposes, that is often desirable.

Textures

Some interesting effects can be constructed by pulling parts of images out of photos and then layering them with various textures. In this case, I found a photo of an old sheet music booklet on flickr and decided to construct something reminiscent of an old photo card with it. I grabbed the image of a pretty girl from a wedding shot I took last summer, converted both the texture and the girl to B&W, colored it sepia, then layered them together with the appropriate blending. I think it still needs some work, but it showed me the concept was workable.