Radically Retired

Tag: Photo Editing

  • Lucky 13

    Lucky 13

    Today, our daughter celebrates her 43rd birthday.

    It seems impossible that those many years have gone by.

    She was born on a Friday 13th, and besides being Mother’s Day weekend, that usually ominous date was a lucky day for us indeed.

    My feature photo is from an old one that needed repair. I used both Adobe Lightroom and Touch/Retouch for the necessary edits.

    Here’s the original:

    I then used chatGPT to create a card to send to her this morning.

    All I had to do was enter a photo of her, list the characteristics I wanted included, and request a birthday card with graphics only.

    Once again, in less than two minutes, the app came through with exactly what I had hoped for.

  • Trade-Offs

    Trade-Offs

    Due to freezing rain and icy streets and sidewalks, this past week and most of the next week aren’t conducive to outdoor walks.

    We’re very fortunate to have an excellent sports facility nearby that features an indoor track.

    Despite it being nearby, I’m driving over there to do my daily power walking.

    My feature photo is the view of the Legacy Park paths from the second floor walking track windows.

    I did some editing to clean up the photo and add a touch of drama to the overcast sky.

    Here’s the original:

    The paths are more apparent in the original and it also gives a better sense of the height it was shot from.

    Sometimes there are trade-offs in post processing, just as there are tradeoffs for walking indoors vs out.

    The trade-offs are both positive and negative. I prefer to focus on the positives
  • In My Mind’s Eye

    In My Mind’s Eye

    On yesterday morning’s power walk, there wasn’t a breath of wind, which resulted in stunning mirror reflections on the river.

    Because I didn’t want to slow my pace, I didn’t take the time to adjust the exposure on my iPhone camera before I took the shot.

    The result was a slightly more washed out photo than what I had hoped for.

    Our province’s motto is “Land of Living Skies”, so my goal in many of the landscape images I capture here at home is to honour that motto.

    In addition to not taking the time to adjust the exposure, I didn’t wait until there were no vehicles passing by. I don’t mind vehicles in a landscape photo that showcases reflections on water, but only if the vehicles themselves are also in the reflection.

    A bit of post processing brought the photo to how I envisioned the scene. I first removed the cars using the eraser in my phone’s native photos app. I then took the photo into the Lightroom mobile app for minor adjustments to exposure and colours. I added a wee bit of vignette at the end to draw more light to the main subject. Within less than five minutes of simple editing, I was able to achieve what was in my mind’s eye for this scene from yesterday morning (feature photo).

    In some instances, I edit out telephone and power lines. This time, the lines were also a detail in the perfect reflection so I left them in.

    Here’s the original.

  • Making it Pop

    Making it Pop

    It’s been some time since I’ve posted about the smart phone photography classes I’m continually taking.

    In a most recent class about photo editing in Lightroom, information was given about how to isolate one colour in a photo and correct/enhance it without disturbing the other colours.

    In my feature photo, the one on the left is the original, so I chose to work only on the blue water and sky, while leaving everything else as shot.