Sunset Over Hutto

Original:  To the bottom left you can see the farm house that did not belong, the dark areas at the upper corners, and an overall film covering the picture.

Final Picture:  The farm house has been cropped, the picture slightly rotated, minor cloning performed, the dark areas fixed, and the colors enhanced.

     Being in the right place at the right time is always a great feeling - being able to capture an image that you would have missed if you had been 5 minutes early or 5 minutes late.

     And then there are those moments where you wait to be in the right place at the right time, like taking a picture of a sunrise or sunset.  

     One such moment for me was shortly after I bought my first digital SLR camera, my formerly beloved Pentax K100.  Currently it is my knock-around camera - the camera that I take with me in bad conditions - but previously it was the camera I constantly had with me to capture every exciting moment of the day.  I only had it for a few weeks when I captured a beautiful sunset over Hutto, Texas.

     At the time I was visiting family, and the visit eventually turned in to an all day event.  Anxious to use my new camera, I became decided to wander around and take pictures.   The area of Hutto I was in was located on top of a large hill that overlooked farmland and houses.  To the west of my location was a small farm, and as the sun began to set I had the idea that it would be great to capture that moment.  It was a cold, crisp day, no wind, and perfect weather for shooting pictures, minus the cold.

     The problem I had was that it was a new camera and I was not yet familiar with all the functions, and I was unsure what settings to use to perfectly capture the moment.  I did not want to take a few pictures and believe I had caught the image perfectly, so I decided to take lots of pictures at different settings, knowing that eventually I would have a perfect picture.  Which it turns out is a good way to shoot pictures - if you are faced with being in the right place at the right time, but you are not sure if you have the perfect settings for the shot, take lots of pictures using different settings, and hopefully one of those pictures will be perfect.  Part of the problem I had was that I was shooting straight in to the sun, so the reading I was getting was going to throw off the contrast in the rest of the picture.

     I came back home, eager to see how my pictures turned out, and was surprised that I had been correct all along - sure enough, the first pictures I shot were not the correct settings - I either overcompensated for the bright sky and it came out too dark, or I undercompensated and it came out too light.  Luckily, subsequent pictures had different settings and I was able to tame the bright sun and bring out the blue in the sky.  But like most pictures, only after taking it in to Photoshop was I able to realize how beautiful it really was.

     In Photoshop (I currently use version CS4) I started off with a beautiful image that just needed some color tweaking and minor retouching.  Photoshop always reminds me of the old Irish Spring soap commercial, where the actor writes in the soap film on the glass shower door to show the layer of film and grime you would have with a different soap.  When I use Photoshop, my goal is to remove that layer of film and grime that the picture has naturally.  The layer of film and grime is most evident if you do a split-screen comparison of the before and after picture - no matter how beautiful the picture is that you start with, Photoshop can remove that layer and make you wonder what was so beautiful about the original photograph to begin with.  

     To start, I changed the IMAGE (go to IMAGE, down to IMAGE SIZE, and change the dimensions to 10 inches width and 8 inches height, and resolution to 300) to a standard size I like to use - 8 x10 inches, 300dpi - and did some minor cropping.  In the original there is a farm house at the bottom left, so I cropped this out as it did not work in the image I wanted to create.  I also did a minor rotation of the picture by using the ROTATE function (go to EDIT, down to TRANSFORM, then select ROTATE; this will only work on a layer that is not the background layer; to do this, go to LAYER, and select DUPLICATE LAYER).

     To tweak the colors, I tried different settings to see what worked best.  Photoshop has lots of great color adjustments, so there is not any one particular setting to recommend.  Some times using the AUTO TONE, AUTO CONTRAST, or AUTO COLOR will be better than what you can manually do yourself (go to IMAGE, and down to AUTO TONE, AUTO CONTRAST or AUTO COLOR), and then other times they will not give you the desired results and you will need to adjust colors manually.  Using LEVELS and CURVES  (go to IMAGE, and down to LEVELS or CURVES) requires a very detailed explanation of how they function, but if you go there and either play around with the controls, or select the PRESETS they provide, you can see how the minute adjustments will dramatically change your picture.  The best way to learn Photoshop is just use the various functions - play around with a picture and see what the different tools and functions do.  If you are good at following instructions in a book, then pick up a User Guide for Photoshop, otherwise, just start playing around with all the functions in Photoshop - eventually you will start learning how they work.  Also, a great resource that I like to use is located at the Photoshop.com website - they have lots of short videos you can watch and learn how an expert does something - how the CLONE tool works, how the MAGNETIC LASSO works, and so forth.

Next Up:  Aliens Strike Llano!