Wednesday, December 07, 2005

More Autumn Colours

Here are some more photographs of trees in Autumn.

This is the same tree as shown in the previous blog. I just love the colour of the leaves. I also like the blocks of grass where the tree stands, and the one behind it, as it adds a bit of symmetry to the picture. The eye, or mine at least, likes to see some symmetry in a picture. I also played a little in PS with this photograph. The original image showed quite a bit of darkness in the foreground so I applied an Adjustment Levels, switched the blending mode to Screen (to lighten up the image) and then used a gradient mask to apply the lightness to the foreground rather than the background.










This photograph was cropped to remove the dark, boring grass at the top and to accentuate the sunset light falling on the log and wood chips. The rock to the right adds nice contrast. Levels broadened the dynamic range and the Curves brightened up the image slightly.








This is a tree from close to the park where I live. I like the trunks of the trees shooting upwards with the leaves shooting outwards from it. Almost like a firework. Again, I used Levels to adjust the colour dynamic range, Curves to brighten the image for printing, and hue/saturation to bring out the colours. The hue has only been adjusted by -3 percent. The saturation has been increased by 15% and the lightness level by 4. This adjustment simply accentuates the colours that are already there. Because I saw the 'firework', I decided not to sharpen this image but rather add some blur.

Damian

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Again, great colours. I like the one you describe as being like a firework. It does look like that! Shame there wasn't more gold behind it, as it's a little messy behind, but a nice pic.

The log shavings and rock doesn't do much for me I'm afraid, but interesting to try and capture the slanting light as it falls on it.

I have a picture of some fall colours in Yosemite valley that I may post sometime. This was more red, but your pics reminded me of that intensity.
Ivan