With the beginning of July comes time to participate in the photo processing challenge hosted by Stacy Fischer at Visual Venturing.  It is an enjoyable digital dark room exercise whereby all participants work on a single photo.  We have the license to be as creative as we like, and explore different techniques.

July Image

This month, the image is kindly provided by Bren Ryan: a beautiful old building on the water’s edge. A medieval castle, or may be a water mill? Here is the original:

As we weren’t told what it was, or where it was, I had to investigate!  A bit of detective work on the web revealed that this is Scotney Castle, a moated medieval English manor house in Kent. It belongs to the National Trust. It was constructed on an island on a small lake. Here is an image showing the surroundings.

My Editing Steps

Back to the job at hand, editing Bren’s original image which I found a little dark.

My first task was to go into Photoshop to bring out more light and detail in the lovely old stones. I made adjustments to the curves, vibrance and saturation. In the process, although the image became brighter and revealed nice detail and colour in the manor house, the sky was now a little overexposed, so I proceeded to add a gradient and applied a solarising filter, which gave an interesting glow to the image.

I could have stopped here, but I felt like playing some more… this is, after all, the idea of the One Photo Focus challenge. So moving right along, I launched FotoSketcher, an application that allows you to transform an image into a drawing, a painting, or in this instance a cartoon. I like the effect: it is a mix of simplified sketch and a watercolour.

 As always, you should take the opportunity to check what other participants to the challenge have done this month by clicking on the One Photo Focus badge.

Thank you Stacy for coordinating the challenge and Bren for providing such a great image.