Before and After in Photoshop

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Joined
Nov 5, 2007
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Location
Dallas, TX
Here are some before and after pictures in Photoshop. What I'm doing is taking the picture and duplicating it into another layer. Think clear plastic stacked on top of each other. You can change one layer which wont affect the other layers above or below it. Then when you combine them back into one picture, the effects can be seen together. I might spend up to an hour on one picture to get it looking right. Recently, Photoshop has gotten better at how you can manipulate colors. It's easier to change and modify individual colors better than years ago.

Before, Some cat in the street. My wife and daughter were in a store and I was waiting outside. Some woman carried a bag of cat food in her purse and stopped to feed this cat.
XVGMlKil.jpg


After:
MCxv25ql.jpg


Before: Street Corner:
yRYzTy6l.jpg


After:
Cw9MNWll.jpg


Historic Building: One thing I really appreciated about Burgas, is they are starting to recognize the historic buildings downtown. Many of them are around 100 years old and the architecture is pretty impressive. Probably because it's before Communism.

Here is the information about the building.
pqh9yTRl.jpg


Before:
UsY5zoxl.jpg


After:
fZripMNl.jpg
 

JohnBoy

Blackhawk
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MINNESOTA - 6 months winter and 6 months rough sle
I used Photoshop for my business. I just bought the software - business expense - so there was no $20 per month for me. It was used to correct balance, color, etc. on photos I was publishing on the net. For me, it was worth the cost as I made a return I could attribute to the quality photos I published.

Photoshop also does a ton of creative stuff - such as above. It is fun to play around with if you like that sort of thing. Who knows? One might create a print that is marketable - or at least something you might want on canvas to hang on the wall!
 

JohnBoy

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Fox Mike said:
Please don't take this wrong but it appears that you are saying you use it to make things look different than they actually are. Is that a good business practice?

Fox Mike - I understand what you are asking - and it is a very fair question.

To answer: I did not adjust to distort, I adjusted to correct color or contrast due to poor lighting or inadequate flash. I was correcting color distortions and correcting a washed-out photo to give it more contrast. Correcting so that the photos properly and fairly represented the actual subject as it appeared in real life.

I knew people in the business (real estate) who did exactly what you are suggesting and that, in my opinion, is wrong.

I knew folks who would use an ultra-wide angle lens to photograph a tiny bathroom. It made it look like a dance hall. The same with small kitchens. Doing so, in my opinion, is wrong. I knew people that went so far as to put a green lawn on a property in place of a brown lawn. Wrong.

Pardon the thread drift . . . I sort of jumped in here to respond to Fox Mike's question. Let me redirect and extend my compliments to the OP for the creative use of Photoshop. Very nice!

I have taken some present-day 'cowboy' shots of myself and given them a sepia tone in Photoshop. It makes them look like the 'old west'. Pretty cool! As a matter of fact, my avatar photo is of myself and has had a 'watercolor effect' applied to it via Photoshop. It is a versatile program to say the least.
 
Joined
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Messages
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JohnBoy: Thanks for the compliment. And yes, I've heard about shady real estate agents altering pictures of their listings the way you describe.

And Fox Mike:
I understand what your saying. I only pay $10 a month, the $20 gives you all the Adobe products, and with those, small businesses could produce their own advertising, brochures and such. I'm not that familiar with them.

But for me, Photography is just a hobby and this is just an extension of that. My wife likes to draw and sketch, I bet she spends more than ten a month on paper and supplies. I've used Photoshop for probably 30 years. I was in high school and my dad bought a copy for a Macintosh he had.

Way back then, a copy was something like four or five hundred dollars, but it came with free upgrades to new versions as they came out. He was a photographer, so it was part of his business.
 

street

Hunter
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Vinton, VA
When your camera captures a photo. Your camera decides what that photo looks like per the software in your camera. Some parts of the photo may be dark and some parts may be too light and not have any detail. Now your camera has captured detail in that part of the photo just like your eye has captured detail in that part of the picture. It's just that the software in your camera is not capable of showing it. That is what Photoshop is all about. It's not changing the photo it's showing what your camera is capable of capturing but it's software is not capable of showing. Photoshop is also able to change the photo anyway you want so that it doesn't look like what you photographed. Of course you don't have to do that but it's up to you.

A painter can look at a scene and paint it any way that he or she likes and everyone will claim it's a masterpiece. But God help a photographer that uses photoshop. His photo suddenly becomes fake. Photoshop is just a tool to capture on screen what your camera is capable of capturing on the memory card. If you like to take pictures then 20 dollars a month for that software is damn cheap!
 
Joined
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A Couple More:
I do appreciate all the comments, good and the bad. I know I have room for improvement.

Here are a couple more. I was just arguing with my wife about whether or not these look like hand drawn pencil sketches. She is right of course, the lighting isn't quite right. Plus, the computer screen is 2D flat, I can't get the texture of oil, or pencil.

This is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in downtown Sofia, Bulgaria. It's a pretty impressive church, and next to it they have a street flea market selling trinkets etc. The picture at night shows the whole of the Cathedral.

Before:
xGvjs5Fl.jpg


After:
UZMi1lxl.jpg


The whole Cathedral taken from a restaurant two blocks away:
xyLaA9rl.jpg


Another I tried to replicate a pencil sketch:
Before:
B3V9bXxl.jpg


After:
yjAqCrxl.jpg
 
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