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Rest

by miller

The end result was not what I had in mind when I originally took the photograph. And I am not an expert in Photoshop. But if you play around a bit in your photo-editing program, you can get some interesting results. And some are even legal here ;)

I was at a local park looking for something for the 'Free Study' challenge. I really didn't get many good shots. But when I went back to my car, I saw this man exhausted on a picnic table in front of me. I was able to get off 3 shots from my car before he left. Here's the original of the shot I used. You can see my car mirror and it's not even close to level.



My first steps were rotating, cropping and resizing. For the crop, I chose to keep the man at the bottom of the photograph to separate him from the surroundings. Then I adjusted the levels and brightness/contrast. I played with color and B&W, but neither really appealed to me.



I basically stumbled across the B&W vs. color effect. I was looking for something to make the image a bit more powerful. When I adjusted the saturation of different channels, specifically the red channel, I saw that the man would become black and white while the background remained green and yellow from the trees. It was exactly what I was looking for - something that clearly showed the separation between man and nature and enhanced the emotion of the shot. I desaturated all channels except for green and yellow. As some people mentioned, it gave a look of desperation, emotion, even death. The final step was unsharp mask.

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