Unit 1 Photo Tweaks

Out of my photos taken for unit 1, a couple came across as a little too light or dark.  One picture in particular stood out as too dark, I was forced to use it as it was the most clear of the few photos I took of the subject, and of course fuzzyness isn't something you can fix in post.  But luckily darkness is!

 In order to brighten up this dark picture of a surfboard I brought the photo into photoshop and played with a few levels and within a couple adjustments it was looking like a new picture.  First I upped the exposure to overall brighten up the picture. Next I upped highlights and whites a little bit to bring out the surfboard more.  However at this point there was a fair amount of added noise especially in any shadow areas so I raised the contrast a touch to try and alleviate that.

Below if a photo of my dog I took to display the use of backlighting.  While I like the picture there is a lot of unnecessary detail in the picture that leaves the eye to wander.

After cropping the image down I found that it's a lot more interesting of a picture.  At first I had trouble cropping the picture beyond a negligible amount, however I decided to just dive into it and really reduce the picture, cropping the picture down to about half its original content.  The results were much better than expected!  The picture still has the same effect as before only it's much stronger than it was previously due how close the camera appears to be to the subject.