A second life.

Like everyone else, you probably have a ton of touristy holiday photos that you looked at once after your vacation, found them completely bland, and if you really felt generous that day, decided not to delete them. Well, chances are, some of them may actually have the makings of a pretty good shot, and some post processing can breath a whole new life into them.



This picture was taken in Portugal. Let's not beat around the bush, it's really not that good (it's bland as hell).

Looking at it two years later, I wanted to see if I could do something with it, as the tower and the bird could make for an interesting composition.

So first, I applied a few textures over one an another, choosing a "cracked" texture first of all to give the stone surface a more rugged cracked look, and overall change the mood of the shot. This was the intermediate result.

Already it's much better. You will also notice that the bird's size also increased and it's position changed. Cheating? Depends. The bird WAS there, I simply improved its relative position a bit. If I hadn't pointed it out, would you have noticed it?

So, I really like the shot much better now. But it's composition could still be improved. So I cropped the shot to keep only the tower itself, and the bird. And this was the end result. From a completely forgettable shot, I got something that I was really happy with.

So, here is a normally nice photo, but I do find it a bit dull. Let's try an transformation.

First of all, make a sepia copy of the initial photo. Add a new layer above the original photo and add the sepia copy to it.




Then blend both photos with the option COLOR and place the opacity slider at about 70%. You hence get the image to the left. While one could stop here, it would be nice to make the readers eye focus on her eyes.




Add a new layer, and add a radial from white to black. Blend the layer with the overlay function and move the opacity slider down do 70%

An here is the final result. Isn't it better ?