Colour range...

The cold weather continues, and I would much sooner stay indoors where it's warm and brush-up on my editing techniques in Adobe Photoshop,  than push through dull and gloomy days with a camera knowing I will have little to inspire me. At this time of year everything seems to stand still - although if you take the trouble to look you will see all sorts of things in nature starting anew - but until the light changes or it warms up a bit I am quite prepared to ride it all out.

During this quite time I have taken the opportunity to go through most of my gear, checking camera support systems (tripods/monopod/ heads, both ball and geared) to ensure smooth operation; cleaned lenses, and generally assembled all the bits and pieces that get scattered about into one place. It is, however, Photoshop that is getting most of my attention at the moment.

Making standard images with a camera and tweaking them in editing software is all fine and dandy, but I feel I have been missing out to some extent when using such a powerful program. Delving deeper below the surface of the software - I have only scratched it to date - gives me many ideas and opportunities to revisit old photos to see if a different slant; a fresh way of looking, will produce something both interesting and pleasing.

The poppies were photographed early one summer morning in June, 2009, near a local airport (the original can be seen here). I isolated only the reds in the image using Colour Range in the Select menu, then converted the rest to mono and added a tint to the black and white areas. That's all: A simple and easy thing to do that completely changes the feel of the picture. I'm going to enjoy this.


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