Caty

When I usually read blogs if someone’s talking about photography they usually have photoshop. I don’t. I used Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 & Picnik.

I edited this on picnik.

I took the exposure down, & then upped the contrast to emphasise the shadows. I then increased the saturation of the photo, so that when I played with the tones afterwards there would still be some ‘pop’. I used the temperature function and increased it by 1, just to make my hair look warmer.

I used the Orton function to soften it and add a richer colour. Using the Soften function usually loses detail, whereas I found that Orton allows you to keep the focus of the photo. I cross-processed at about 85%, before converting it to black and white. I played with the colour tones, moving from red to aquamarine, and then faded the black out to 80-90%. I finally adjusted the exposure and saturation again, decreasing it.

The background was too distracting. I cropped the top of the photo out originally, but the banister on the right of the photo was still too jarring. To remove the majority of it I had to crop onto the tips of my fingers.

That’s it. Yeah, I know, pretty easy, but I do love this photo.