Photography

Fun with Photos: Cannon Fire Photo Editing

posted on : January 11, 2011 posted by : Lisa

I love playing around with my photo editing software! I have been using Paint Shop Pro 8 for something like 5 years. I love Photoshop, when I was going to school for graphic design, I always used Photoshop. It is sooo expensive, and there is pretty much no chance that I will own it anytime soon. Paint Shop Pro 8 is very much like Photoshop. At one time I would say that PSPro was a good competitor for Photoshop, until it was sold by Jasc Software to Corel. When I decided that I actually needed to buy photo editing software instead of using someone else’s, I went out and got PSPro 10 or 11 or 12 or whatever is was at the time, brought it home and couldn’t bring myself to open it. I dug around and found that Corel made some major changes to PSP after it took over, and it lost the Photoshop type feel to it, and they even did away with the animation program that comes with it. Major bummer there! So I hunted down good old (old!) Paint Shop Pro 8 for my photo editing and have been a happy camper ever since.

I love this photo of cannon fire from Williamsburg. I decided it would be fun to play around with and see what types of changes I could make. This is what I came up with.

Here is the original photo, with just the smallest amount of adjustment to contrast/brightness and I used the clarify tool just a bit.
This is aged newspaper filter, aged 25 years. Not as happy as I would like to be with this, but this is better than the next one.
This is aged newspaper as well, aged 100 years. I love it, except for the white patches that ruin it. I messed around with it a bit and anything else that I did to get rid of the bright white took away the aged paper look that I was going for.
This is a fun little sunburst effect…lets try to ignore the fact that the shadows don’t match up with the angle of the sun. I just think it was a fun effect to play around with.
Now I don’t even remember which one this is, I think it was a very mild use of colored pencil.
Kaleidoscope filter. That is all. Just for fun.
Solarizing effect. This photo is a bit too busy for this filter, I think all the bricks and small detail take away from this fun effect. But I love the way it makes the sky look and the smaller random branches look pretty cool too.
This is a monotone effect. This one always take me a lot of fine tuning to get it to not look flat. The bright white from the smoke made this on kind of hard to balance out. I was trying to get more detail to pop in the flag, but that brought other issues to the photo and it made other parts too dark. I like the way it turned out though.
This might be my favorite edit! All I did was use the clarify on the highest setting, which was 5 and reapplied it over and over until it ended up like this. Maybe like 11-12 times or so. I love what it did to the sky. Without all of the people watching the reenactment off to the side, this photo kind of gives me the feeling of a battle taking place while a storm looms overhead.
This last one here I “added noise”. I set it to a uniform setting so the noise, which is a bunch of tiny dots was evenly spread out across the photo. I also set it for the highest amount of noise which is 100. It gives it a slightly aged and grainy look, like from the 60’s or 70’s

I had fun playing round with these. I am going to pick another photo tomorrow and mess around with that too. How about some snow pictures, what do you think? We are supposed to get a couple of inches tonight and have a nice coating. I am not expecting too much snow, so if there is not enough for some good photos, I will pick one from last year.

If you have any snowy photos that you want to edit in a fun way, I would love to see them tomorrow!

About The Author

Lisa

Related Posts

Self Portrait – Pft!

Thinking. Changing. Daily. Not lost. Just resting. The Sun can’t help up rise…

September 19, 2013

Self Portrait – Under a Shaded Tree

April 25, 2013

COMMENT

  1. Karrie | 12th Jan 11

    How fun!!!!!!
    I use Corel and though I have no experience with any other editing software, I find I am getting used to it enough to get my desired results from the pictures….you have inspired me to not be afraid to play around with the software in extreme ways to get different feels!!

    • Hazel Nut | 12th Jan 11

      I had a really good time! I used to play round with it more when I had more time, just for fun. I figure if I share my photos then at least I have an excuse for playing on the computer, lol.

      I bet if I would have started with Corel, I would have been happy with it. Sometimes, change is scary haha!

Leave A Comment

I would love to hear your thoughts