As a creative person, you will often see a photo that is pretty interesting to begin with. By making a few minor adjustments you are able to fix any flaw or add details. Photoshop is a great tool in preparing images or for editing web graphics. It is also a fun tool for an exercise like this.
A good example is this photo of this lady sitting at the pool; when turned 90 degrees, it appears that she’s sitting on a ledge and there is a wall of water. It is fun a to take a cool photo like this and make it even better.
The original photo, shown below, has some background distractions that take away the “wall of water” sensation.
Original Photo Before Photoshop Image Editing
After Editing in Photoshop
Everything was done in Photoshop CS4 using masks, patch tool and healing brush as well as rotating a layer to make the lady’s head look as if she’s not struggling to keep still in water.
Here’s a side by side comparison. What do you think?
I agree with you, ( …mostly
)
For myself, editing images is one of the last expressive, uncorrupted, “artistic” practices of web designers. I work as a part of an “in-house” design team that follows brand guidelines and UI specifications which as you can imagine leaves little room for creativity. Editing images is probably one place where we can express our creativity and we spend most of our the time on it, customizing every little pixel, replacing colors and bringing in new ideas. Plus you can always put little subliminal things in there that no one else but you knows about
Exercise is important. However, I prefer not to do it myself. Ever heard of iStock’s Steel Cage [1], or Veer’s Lightboxing [2]? Practicing the techniques you described and others can be done in a collaborative environment with other designers. It’s fun, plus you get free feedback, which I think is invaluable. For example, you post the picture from your example above, and I post something like this:
http://img847.imageshack.us/i/whale.gif/
Than you edit it further by maybe adding a waterfall over the lady, and repost for me as a challenge. The community votes on the submissions and provides feedback. It’s quite insightful.
[1] http://www.istockphoto.com/participate/steel-cage/
[2] http://ideas.veer.com/
Thanks for sharing the resources. I’ll definitely have to take a look at those. I need to write a follow up post to this article. Been trying to get the site up and cracking.