Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The Romantisization of Roxana's Horses



Roxana Balint kindly mailed me this beautiful picture for me to play around with. Horses are well known for not standing exactly where photographers want them to, and posts sometimes need deleting (I know what you're thinking) The black horse was too near the tree and also the fence above , and too level with the white horse.


The little forground tree swings the eye into the composition nicely, but the posts interfered with this movement. The sky was easily selected with the wand to be romantisized a little, and saturation generally was increased very slightly.


Angled Strokes were applied with minimum stoke length in order to unify the picture and disguise any flaws from repainting (when the horse was moved, for instance, and when the sky was selected).


Details were cleaned up with Clone Stamp at either 50% or 100% opacity. So easy, but rubbish does not improve a picture just because it's there, does it? Thank you Roxana and Romania for being beautiful.
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6 comments:

  1. Nice one! You seem to be pretty good at correcting pictures, plus you explain the reasons pretty well.

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  2. Looks really beautiful,
    in my happy world though, all those beautiful pictures had been really the way they were, without editing. ;)
    But i´ll get over it.^^
    Nice work
    -martialme84-

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  3. Thanks for dropping by Ed. Photographs used to be more 'truthful', but the beauty of nature is more in the mind than in reality. Fashions change, and nature does not try to be beautiful after all.

    However, it is human nature to want photographs to be as natural as possible, but little changes can improve while not being obvious. The boundary between photos and paintings, or 'Art' is interesting. Photos are 'easy' and painting is 'difficult' This is also an important factor, and we often want to admire the skill, craftsmanship, and meaning of an image - not just the image itself.

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  4. beautiful landscape. did you do painting of this picture?

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  5. Nice work.
    All these years playing with photoshop and I've neevr taught myself how to fix a sky.

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  6. Oi! Monica, who said i fixed skies? OK, just a little bit sometimes - but I wish I could draw like you. Do you make your talent earn for you? I hope so.

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