Alright, dear readers, Kate here. Today’s a special day for all of you! Today, Anne and I have teamed up for a post! It’s a new thing we’ll be repeating a lot as we get this whole “post a blog post” thing under our belts. Today’s collaboration is called Hack My Photo! and here are the rules:
- You choose a photo for your partner in crime to edit.
- This photo cannot be more than a year old.
- You have a set time limit to edit the photo you are given. Our time limit is 30 minutes.
And that’s it. Pretty easy. Except when you’re editing a photo you didn’t take.
Here’s the original photo Anne sent to me unedited, followed by the original unedited photo I sent to her.
Anne’s original photo.
Kate’s original photo.
We’ll start with my edits because I’m the one typing this up. When editing photos, I don’t usually even think to crop them. This is because my shooting style is to zoom in/out to get the shot I want or move around until it’s framed the way I want it without me having to crop it in post. So then, my first thought with the photo I was given was to bring out some sunlight and brighten the sky up a bit since it looks like it was a dreary day the day this photo was taken. I did all of that in Camera Raw by adjusting the exposure and brightness and such. I fiddled with specific colors’ saturation levels to try to get the sky even the tiniest bit more blue, but couldn’t make it work. So I took the photo into Photoshop. My go-to edit is Linear Contrast, so I slapped that on before doing anything else. I love the way it looks. From there, I did some more hue altering and brought out the blue in the sky by using the magic wand to select the sky area, making a new layer, adjusting the hue and saturation, and then changing that layer’s opacity to make it look more natural and less obviously edited. I also did something similar to get the dark colors darker – I copied the original layer in Photoshop and layered it on with Darken and adjusted the opacity until I had it where I like it. I tend to like darker photos with heavier contrast, and that’s what I ended up doing with this one.
Edited only in Camera Raw by Kate.
Continued edits in Photoshop by Kate.
Anne’s edit of her own photo.
And now, here’s Anne’s bit, as written by her:
When I first saw this photo I loved the colors, the purple, yellow, white and bright spring green. So I opened it and got into editing it. However, because I am OCD or ADHD or whatever other acronym you want to throw in there my eye kept being drawn to the brown curly leaf(?) behind the iris. So I thought okay I will take this into PS and be done with it… I forgot about the fuzzy yellow stuff! So to cut a long story short it was just too much work in the 30 min time limit we gave ourselves. I liked the daisies on the right side and so I just went with them. For the first edit after doing a screen layer and a multiply layer and flattening them both in-between I went into the lens distort filter and added a small vignette and then a small bowing of the lens to give it a miniscule fisheye effect but in reality to bring the front flower and stem closer. The second part I didn’t crop as close as I wanted more of the vignette and more of the colors. I love the hint of pink in it. For the last one I cropped it closer but I’m not sure if I am happy with the results as you can see grain/noise in the photo. If I had more time I would probably go back in there with my pen and get all the fuzzy yellow stuff and use the picture as a whole but my (acronym here) wouldn’t let me.
Anne’s first edit.
Anne’s second edit.
Anne’s third edit.
Kate’s edit of her own photo.
Kate here again to send you off, dear readers. What do you think? Do you think our editing styles are similar? Would you have edited either photo differently? Let us know in the comments! We’d love to hear from you, our lovely readers!
Get out there and shoot!
Kate & Anne
Behind the Things You See 