We get a huge kick out of messing with our photos, and there are loads of software tools out there that can give your photos a really fun twist. We use Adobe’s Lightroom software for managing our libraries of photos (we each take about 35,000 photos a year, so keeping track of all these photos is quite a job!). Lightroom is also a fabulous tool for touching up the photos so they look their best.
Some folks may feel that post-processing photos on the computer is “cheating,” but it is actually half of the skill set needed for making great images. Composition and exposure of the photo is only the first half, and the hours spent post-processing on the computer are comparable to time film photographers used to spend in the darkroom years ago. Ansel Adams was famous for spending days in his darkroom tweaking his photos, and he even wrote a book about it called The Print. Likewise, modern photographers spend days on their computers!
Mark recently took a photo of the side of a building in Phoenix that was interesting for its shadows and patterns:
This photo has some interesting lines and shapes…
He decided to play with it a little bit using a very cool software tool called Topaz Adjust. With just a few mouse clicks he transformed the photo from the one above to the one below.
…WOW !!
Yowza!! It looks like some exotic underwater scene in an aquarium! Of course, getting wild and extreme like this isn’t for every photographer or for every photograph, but it sure is fun to play with!!