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Autumn Fire With Hydrant
Print
Yes, it’s always good to have a fire hydrant handy in case those blazing fall colours get carried away, especially when you have imaginary, drug-induced, curly/swirly winds in the sky, à la Vincent van Gogh on a good day. Moving right along.... ...this picture is actually about “post-processing” technique, i.e. what you do with a problematic picture after you’ve moved it from your camera to your computer. The original (and larger) shot was taken in Toronto at Ashbridges Bay using an upper end point-and-shoot camera (Panasonic LX3) which produced a 10 megapixel image at 400 ISO. This was cropped down to a six megapixel version, which led to two problems. The first was that there was unwelcomed noise in the darker areas primarily because this photographer forgot to check the camera settings before happily firing away. In fact it was bright enough to use a lower, less noisy setting like ISO 100 or 200. The second was that the cropped (and noisy) six megapixel image was in danger of looking very rough when printed any larger than 11" x 8 ½". Hmmmm... what to do? The answer turned out to be Topaz Clean 2 from Topaz Labs. What this Photoshop plug-in did was smooth out the unwanted noise while keeping the important details. While a number of other Photoshop tools came into play, the Topaz plug-in provided the vector-like edge and colour smoothness that formed the base of this playful image. The end result can easily be printed larger than our current maximum of 22" x17". Pretty good for a 6-megapixel snapshot. Click here to see more pictures. All photographs will be sent unmounted and unframed. For help in visualizing what this image would look liked framed, we have these examples:
1. with a simple black frame and white matte 2. black frame white matte on a wall 3. with a colour-coordinated matte and frame 4. colour matte and frame on a wall
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