Short life of unpromising image

17/11/09

The purpose of this tutorial is an effort to show that something can be created out of very little, via a few simple one click steps.

Let us start with the image itself :
























































At the time of taking this fairly mundane, pointless, l've nothing better to do, holiday snap shot, and upon subsequently reviewing the image on the camera's screen, l was very much tempted to delete. Now this would have gone very much against one of my golden rules, ie: do not delete from screen, simply because the screen always, always lies as to the image that you have taken. Take the image home, download it to your computer, look at it on the computer screen and then delete or save as the mood takes you.

The image is now down on my computer, and at this stage you need to know a little about the Work flow program that l use, ie: Lightroom.

Post processing programs abound and there are a number of very good bits of software that can be downloaded for free and which will deal with basic manipulation and cataloging of images. One such package being Picasa. They are, however, limited in what they can do, especially by way of image manipulation. Many folk go down the Photoshop route, a program marketed by Adobe and which is the be all and end all of image manipulation programs.

For some in the market place, there is however a flaw or two attached to Photoshop, and that is the lack of a Raw Converter ( this you may not need to know about at this stage ) and a cataloguing facility. This eases people towards programs such as Lightroom ( which so happens to be an Adobe piece of software ) and Aperture produced by Apple. Both those programs tend to mirror each other.

As l have said earlier, l use Lightroom. Within Lightroom there is a function called " Presets " which are specifically designed " effects " that can be applied to images at one click of the mouse. The vast majority of these presets, and there are hundreds, can be downloaded for free from the Adobe site and others.

I therefore decided to fiddle a little with this image, not a lot, just applying a couple of Presets to see what l could do.

The first preset was one designed to deal with contrast, and that produced this image :























































Still very disappointing and surely destined for the Trash button.

However having at least another minute or two to spare, l applied a further " Preset " and this was the result :
























































I would stress that all l have done to get to this stage is press the mouse button twice. It really is that simple - it must be, cause l can use it.

Now l'm not saying that this is the world's greatest image, nor indeed the best image l have ever produced, but it is a darn sight more interesting than the out of camera snap shot, that l was tempted to delete from the camera moments after taking the original shot. Now having got this far with the image, l am tempted to spend just a little more time tweaking what l see on screen in an effort to improve it further. Whilst it may not be to everyones taste, l quite like it in a quirky sort of way, and it was certainly worth the minute or two of effort to achieve this look.

I've decided to name this image " The USS get out of my way punk "