A little fauxtography

I was thinking the other day about the old timey Instamatic and Polaroids, they managed through cheap optics to vignette the skies in the corner so they were a tidge darker which lent to helping frame the center of the image.  Simple task in CS5 to duplicate.

Here I started with RAW images.  Upped the clarity, vibrance and saturation so you got the look of the old Kodachrome or Polaroid films.  Then I opened the image.

With the image opened up I created a layer.  Then I used the oval tool and created an oval that went nearly all the way from top to bottom and edge to edge.  I right clicked and selected invert.  I right clicked again and went to the feather edges and went for the max feathering of 250 pixels.

The next step was to go down to the lower right corner and use the brightness tool and drop the brightness down until the corners began to darken...to taste by a factor of -50 to -75.  I then used the merge visible.  Et voila (that's rough French for "and there you have it") a knock off of an old Polaroid or Instamatic Kodachrome with a digital camera..

These images btw were shot out at Joshua Tree National Park over the weekend while hiking on Fathers Day. See why I said I need to go out there and spend more time there?

Few more panoramic images from Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree National Park is a magical place, but then again I feel that way about most of the desert.  It takes special critters and plants to survive out there.  And each is so uniquely adapted to the harsh environment that they are so unlike what you find in the rest of the country.  Very cool stuff there Maynard.

In CS5 for reasons I don't understand you can't do even basic manipulations and corrections to a panoramic image.  You need to save it as a jpeg then do your image corrections.  In this case as I shot late morning and colors were starting to desaturate and such I needed to do some color correction and tone correction in order for them to pop a bit better.  From the PSD image I saved as a JPEG then did my corrections then resized for this blog...yup they have size limitations.  You can click to get bigger images to get a bigger sense of space of Joshua Tree.  The place is quite spectacular and not devoid of life at all...contrary to one one would think of a desert.

Can't wait to get there for the wild flowers while they are in bloom next spring!

Coming out of a post-migraine hangover

And its a doozie of a migraine hangover, will spare you all the gorie details but the last 6 months I have been battling non-stop chronic migraines that with the help of a talented neurologist over at Kaiser I finally have a handle on controlling them.  Needless to say the near constant headaches put a crimp in the creativity. To celebrate I took a little day hike out into the desert.  Specifically we hiked around Joshua Tree National Park not far from where my daughter and son-in-law live in Twentynine Palms, CA.

Each of these panoramic images were post processed with the help of Adobe's CS5...no I'm not getting CS6 any time soon as 5 works just fine for me.

I'll post more images in the next few days of the area.  Can't wait to get back out there to shoot more.  Would love to shoot the wild flowers when the are in bloom in the spring.  It would be really nice to watch a sunrise or sunset among the red/orange rocks as well.