The difference a little shadow makes

If you start with one picture, taken yesterday.

Ahh, pour the warmth on

A nice afternoon in Texas during early spring after a late freeze.  There’s a chill in the air but the sky is a clear blue and it’s a great day to be outdoors.

Deepen the shadows, it becomes.

AHHHH!! It burns! Turn it off! Turn it off!

Snow Rose Play

Continuing from the Gimp Gnowledge post, a friend suggested I mask off the rose and darken the wood.  I went one step further and desaturated the picture but can’t decide if I like the fully desaturated version:

or if I prefer the lightly desaturated one.

Of course now I should mask off the sky and modify it so that it doesn’t turn white when desaturated.  Or I could deepen the blue and just desaturate the wood so it looks old.  Or… #neverending.

Gimp Gnowledge

I’ve been having all sorts of fun (and frustration) learning how to do more complicated image editing and thought I’d share my latest.

On the wonderful snow days of Dec 25 & 26, 2012 (oh how they will be fondly remembered) I took the following photo.

Pleasing to the eye it is.

Based on learning to use masks in Gimp which I’ve been using to enhance my bracketed sky shots and a few single frames I decided to apply the glernin to an “older” picture.

Thence, the following:

Hey, wait a minute.  Looking at the latter picture by itself I liked the changes.  Even toggling the mask layer on and off I really felt the new version was much better.

Seeing them side by side like this I’m not so sure.  The rose pops out more in the first version and remains as the focus of the picture.  In the latter more can be seen but that takes focus away from the rose.

What do you think?