hdr photoshop

this is a picture i did for a local business. i quite like how it came out. i feel like this is a step in a more commercial direction for my work. i just bumped up the amount of ram on my mac, so now i can do more intensive photoshop things, and not get the spinning beach ball of death every two minutes. plus it seems like my vision is moving beyond the "purist structure" of only using lightroom, and only tweaking the image so far. now i'm more interested in what mood and concept i can create, how many ideas i can pack into a single image, and still make it captivating and visually interesting. it's an interesting new dimension i can explore. i'm looking forward to it.

hacking hipstamatic

so, i found a post by isayx3 that talked about how to apply effects from the iphone app "hipstamatic" to your photos in photoshop. it's fun, and pretty easy to do. basically hipstamatic has some gradient blob images that it overlays on your iphone pictures to make a "light leak" effect. kinda like when the back of your old 35mm film camera didn't close up tight enough, and light got in and contaminated the film.

of course, with the hipstamatic app, you can't control it much. you press the button, and maybe you get a cool image, maybe you don't. pull apart the app, drop the gradients into photoshop, and suddenly there's a lot more options. you can choose your blend modes, you can play with opacity, with position, mask bits out, rotate the blobs around.... there's a lot of options.

it's a fun effect. it has a retro feel, since modern (usually digital) cameras don't have a back door that can accidentally let light in. or film to be contaminated in the first place. so it makes the picture feel like it's of an older generation. like it had been taken with film, on a beat up old 35mm camera.

it's interesting how aesthetic choices like putting a gradient blob on a picture can evoke certain responses in viewers. as photographic prints age, the whites yellow, and the blacks take on a blue tint.  when you dig a picture up out of a forgotten drawer or ancient chest, it's going to look that way. and with photoshop and modern digital images, you can manipulate pictures taken recently to look like they've been forgotten and aged for a couple of decades. you can push that button in a viewer's head, just by shifting the colors around a bit.

of course, digital images don't fade and color shift like that. which means twenty, thirty years from now pictures taken these days won't have yellowed whites and blue shadows. they'll look exactly like they do now. maybe by then photography technology will have progressed to the point that our current pictures will have a certain "look" to them, a certain charming simplicity, just because they're not in holographic 3-d, or whatever breakthroughs in technology will occur in the next two or three decades.

seems like the past often looks quaint. i just wonder what it is about the pictures we take today will look simple and "retro" in hindsight.

faces of eugene - 003