The Sky's the Limit

It's DISMAL, I know - boring colours, flat composition. Not much to be done with it, but scroll down anyway to see the effect of cropping, increasing the colour saturation, and clicking on two Photoshop filters called Rough Pastel and Angled Strokes, You can choose settings for these filters but they show up right away and you can play with different ones. 


 These notes are not intended as tutorials but to show what can be done easily, and with other editing programs as well.


Simple improvements are really quick once you are familiar with a few tools. and for the creatively inclined, the sky really is the limit.

How to compose and edit photographs. Part 1

After a lifetime's fascination with the photographic image Dr A wants to share some stuff with you. He knows 3 things for sure:

1. Picture composition has rules (like musical composition).

2. There are lots of them, but they are all logical, fun to learn, and make a difference to the appeal of ordinary photographs.

3. Only experience teaches you to compose pictures in the camera automatically, but a few seconds thinking is worth a thousand pictures - or something like that. AND most can be improved with simple editing.

This is going to be a regular column, and Dr A wants to see your pictures here for possible fixing. (providing they are not better than his. CB)



Just as good music is not random noise, good pictures are not random images. They share certain things - rhythm, form, balance, harmony, and line (melody).

Music is a pain when the rhythm is wrong. Music can be just rhythm - Indian music can take this to the ultimate. Pictures can have rhythm too.

Musical form is always there, it is hidden away most of the time, but your brain knows if it is badly wrong. Balance is part of form; it works quietly to make a musical piece feel better. I use 'form' in pictures to mean the overall design, made up of details.

Harmony can be totally overridden in modern music - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, etc. introduced discord bit by bit until now some discord is the new harmony. . By 'harmony' in pictures I mean how the main shapes seem to 'live together'.

Melodic line is not fashionable at the moment in music, but lines are important in pictures. Note, lines include edges.

The Brain. I use this word to mean the grey matter that receives the input of sight and sound. This brain likes to tell you what to think as well. Call it ‘instinct’ if you like, but it makes you feel uneasy, or satisfied with an image without your knowing the reason. An artist can manipulate this process – a great artist can do this greatly.

We are just going to post modest pictures and try to explain the thinking (and the instincts) behind them in terms of COMPOSITION only. Dr A is a beginner at photo-editing, but the simple tools can really do wonders for any photograph that you might want to improve.

notes - composition and editing

The picture straight from camera was not a bad composition; editing is mostly cleaning up distracting details - entirely with Photoshop 'clone stamp. The rock Molly is sitting on was extended for a better base to the picture.

Most lines tend to lead the eye to Molly's own which was painted a bit - a little colour and a pupil. Her profile was lightened to read better against her body.

The movement in this picture is the strong diagonal - top left > bottom right, and the 'swing' of Molly's head. There is a weak diagonal formed by the branches and the rocks bottom left. This creates a balance.

Molly's outline is fairly clear, but a bit 'lumpy' , not very 'cat-shaped'. This, for me is the main fault.

There is a 'co-incidence' that normally I would have edited out, but left in. Its a small thing but looks almost deliberate. When you find it your eyes will keep returning to it.

Let me know what it is. And thank you for looking.

Molly, for composition - raw image

Straight from the camera; except for the crop no clean-up, no filters. The most glaring compositional faults for me are the continuation of Molly's outline in the rock below, and the 'lumpy' boring shape of the subject, even though the outline is reasonably clear . Molly's profile is not strong either. No more than 4/10 for this shot, but the clean-up is a little better perhaps.