editing

Lens-Artists Challenge #154 / 410 – One Photo Edited

Just like Ritva, I love editing – and this time I had some extra help…Please visit Ritva’s inspirational site for more different edits! Thank you, Ritva, for a great challenge – I hope you won’t mind some tweaking for my granddaughter…

I have chosen pictures from my Africa gallery, and I can assure you, I had some lovely hours editing! The first picture features one of all the icredibly beautiful skies in Zimbabwe, seen from the Zambesi river.

All the original pictures are on the left side, and the extra edited ones are on the right side. Usually, I enhance the light if needed, sometimes a light saturation, and sometimes a crop if the main object sits in the ”wrong” place. Here I felt free to use some more tricks for Ritva’s interesting challenge.

In this photo, I wanted to get back the warm, golden light before the sunset was complete. (I missed out on that one, so, in fact I saw both these sights, within a short amount of time. Each beautiful in its own way.

The above picture was taken from the easternmost part of Victoria Falls, on the border to Zambia. I fell in love with the little hut sitting just on the precipice – but had difficulties in showing the sight I saw inside my head and the feeling I had of Nature Magic. In the end I resorted to AI, which produced a kind of fantasy picture the looks of JRR Tolkien’s trilogy of the Ring – Rivendell. This result failed me in my own tries.

In this indoor picture from our ”tent” at the camp in South Africa, I loved all the creases and the soft, golden light – but also saw a potential winter’s tale from Sweden. Taking down the highlight, I was still not happy with the window look, so I darkened the picture some, and found a Lightroom preset that both intensified the creases, and made a snowy-like look through the window. This might as well have been a winter stay up north in Sweden.

Often the bush would surprise us with a long neck suddenly peeping up over the trees. I found those moments hilarious, and thought I would make this shot a bit more movie – like. I found a Lightroom preset that fit my inner image, darkening the background and enhancing the giraffe almost into a comic strip figure.

Back to a short real life feeling again! Like many of us, I love water drops, and they often look amazing converted into B&W. Here done with Nik collection.

As my granddaughter of 4 1/2 was here today, and she is in a dragon-and-unicorn phase right now, I might have guessed her answer to my question about what more I should do with this picture … Of course a Dragon is the answer to everything!

Last week we featured a guest host, Steve Hyde (of Steve Hyde Photography Blog) and he provided us with a wonderful, but difficult, challenge. We loved all the fantastic, Best Ever Photos you shared!

Sofia will return next week, so we will see what she has in store for us. Tune in to find out more about the challenge then.

Until then, please stay curious, positive and kind.

You can keep up with all of our challenges by subscribing to the Lens-Artists team members websites: Tina, Patti, Ann-Christine, John, Sofia, Anne, Egidio, Beth. Ritva,

For information on how to join the Lens-Artists challenge please click here.

John leads us this week, and wants us to share three or four favourite photos before and after editing. It is amazing what we can do with everything from cropping to AI! Maybe editing is not my favourite thing, but in order to be happy with our photos, I think most of us do something – like increasing light or cropping.

John’s challenge was just in time for my biggest photo project ever – scanning and editing our old slides. Trying to bring back the feeling I and my husband had when we took the shot is not easy. I have started with Greenland from 1982. I guess there are software better for this task than what I have, but I will use the tools I have available. Which also tells that these photos are not favourites, but works in progress…

I always start in LR. Here I raised the exposure and added a mask for brightening of some shadows, then I reduced noise and haze. I always reduce highlight and raise the white. Then it is time to remove spots – and the slides have MANY spots. So, I will not repeat this sentence for the rest of them. Unfortunately the sky could not be altered smoothly, so I left it the way it was.

LR again, exposure up and shadows. Then masking to adjust the darkest parts, and after that, some noise reduction. I also raised the texture a bit for the beauty of the mountains. The sky was not a happy one, nor was the greenish snow on top, so I tried a new sky to match the ground colours, and reducing the saturation of green.

Some of the slides – quite many in fact, has got a thin blue line somewhere in the picture. Raising the exposure also revealed how hopeless the look of little me is here. So I removed myself as well. (That would be a useful possibility in real life too…) Photoshop is better than Lightroom to remove things you don’t want in the picture. Then back to LR and a reduction of noise and saturation (or sometimes an increased saturation) of yellow, green, blue and orange.

This looked a rather gloomy valley, but was one of the pictures I was quite happy with after editing. Maybe because there was no need to do much. Highlights and shadows adjusted, I reduced the haze a bit and calibration of the colour blue to deepen the overall colours. In PS I changed the sky, which I think lifted the whole landscape.

Finally – I would be grateful for any tips and tricks from anyone who has edited old slides!

John asks us to feature three or four images in our gallery that we tweaked for whatever reason as well as the original image straight out of the camera.

Last week, Sofia challenged us with Water in Motion – a delightful theme for all of us, with varied and creative answers! Next week, Donna of https://windkisses.com/ will host the challenge. Please visit her lovely site for inspiration, and you can find more information here if you want to join the fun.