Before I get into this post, I just wanted to say that there seems to be lots of new visitors to my website from abroad in the past few months, America and Canada in particular but also India, China, and various parts of Europe, so I wanted to say “hi” and thanks for taking an interest in my work😊.

Right, on to photography! I made a picture recently called ‘Lies’. All my photos are special to me but some are more precious than others and this particular image was precious for many reasons. However, although I loved the concept I was much less happy with the execution.

For starters I’d really struggled to cut the tree out in the image so that I could change the background and had been left with lots of distracting bright patches. Secondly I didn’t like the colour tone. And thirdly it lacked……….something, though I wasn’t sure what.

I’ve recently attended an online Photoshop summit and been reminded of a few editing techniques I’d forgotten about, which I thought I could use to try and make my tree cut-out better. It’s still been mind numbingly boring, tear-my-hair-out frustrating and taken ages but I think I’ve finally managed to improve the background behind the tree.

Because I could isolate the background more I was then able to add a texture to it, which has given the photo the ‘something’ I feel was lacking.

I then played around with various colours & tones using Photo Filter, the colour channels in Curves and selective colour adjustments and am much happier with the result.

When we’re making an image we can get very emotionally invested, particularly if it’s about something important to us, and often can’t see the wood for the trees. Don’t be afraid to take a step back once your emotions have settled and to look again at a picture with a more dispassionate and critical eye.