Michelle Wrighton Fine Art and Photography

There are so many different effects and manipulations that can be achieved using photoshop, from simple black and white/sepia tones, cropping and editing out unwanted items like leads or signs to significant special effects that dramatically alter the original image.

The following are just some examples of some of the photoshop adjustment services that are available to my customers (I will add more examples as I find them in my folders).

From this…                                                                                 To this.

From the original photo on the left, I cropped the image, edited out the white pole and lead, and ‘re-painted’ the fur around the neck where it was displaced by the collar.

The original photo on the left in my opinion is not suitable for printing, but it is a good candidate to artistic manipulations such as this watercolour effect (you will need to click to enlarge to see the textural effect in the image).

In the above example, the original photo has been colour corrected, contrast adjusted, cropped, the distracting background has been re-painted and blurred to emphasise Flicka’s beautiful colouring, and a border and name text has been added to finish it off.

This next example has had additional water painted in at the bottom of the image, as well as having the lead rope and the owners forearm removed.

This example has had the background edited, and the image has been altered to black and white with colour accent enhancement.

Taking nice photographs of pets and other animals is the easy part when you know how - part of it involves taking hundreds at a time:).  That’s the best thing about digital cameras, taking hundred’s of photos every day isn’t expensive like it was in the days of film.

But learning to take good photographs is only the start , you really need to learn how to use a good graphics program like Photoshop, or at least that’s what I tell myself after I’ve spent *another* three hours playing with a photo;)  Seriously though, there are so many cool effects that you can do with graphics programs that it is so worth the time and effort that it takes to learn how to use them.

Generally speaking, it is always better to get everything with the lighting, pose and background as perfect as possible before you take the photo.  But sometimes with animals that is just not possible – especially when photographing cats.  If you have a cat, well then you know that cats just do what they want when they want and you really just have to work with them rather than against them.  Ha ha – otherwise you end up with a cat-astrophe!

The first photo below is an original photo of one of our cat’s, Tara and is a good example of the background not being perfect.  Tara is not a particularly affectionate cat and she really does not like having her photo taken so good photos of her are few and far between (actually, that is an understatement, judging by her reaction when she sees it, I am sure she thinks that the camera is some sort of cat-torture-device!).

However, I managed to snap this photo of her as she was running away from my camera/cat-torture-device only because she stopped to give me this look of disgust:)

Unfortunately, in the photo it looks like she has a stick growing out of her ear and under her chin.

Thank goodness for Photshop because I was able to remove the stick that was growing out her ear, as well as the bit under her chin.  I also burned the background edges to focus more on Tara’s face and I lightened her eyes just a tad.  Viola!  Now I finally have a photo of Tara worth having enlarged and framed!

In a similar fashion, using the clone stamp, healing brush and blur tools of various diameter I was also able to remove the collar and tags from this photo of Jess, and then burn in a black background so that the focus is now directly on Jess.  Oh yeah, and I removed the gooby drool hanging from her bottom lip (the Schmacko’s made her do it!)

Taking a photo from this…

To this….

Although I really need to put a white border around it so that the edge of the photo shows up against the black of this page.

I’ve always believed that Photography is in itself an artform, and just like photography, using a graphics program to enhance or improve photos is just like learning to use another art medium (like pastels or oil paint).  At some stage in the future I’d really like to explore abstract nature photography combined with digital manipulations because I think that the possibilities for creating unique art would be endless, and a lot of fun.  Course I will have to work out how to fit another three or four days into the week just to find the time:)