Touch Ups: Photo Finessing and Mangling

I take a lot of photos. Some might say too many, but digital is cheap and my skills are weak so I feel my best chance is to take too many and then weed out the bad ones. I'd say the ratio of good to bad is about 1:100, so I pretty much have to take a lot of photos.

Weeding is very important, because I process every single photo before I publish it. (Publish? That sounds too official for what I do. I just put 'em on websites for nobody to look at.) That would be a lot of work, if I processed all the bad ones, too. Mostly, I use Photoshop to tighten the photos up; darken the darks and lighten the lights. It can make a pretty profound difference. There is an auto-level correction function in Photoshop, but I rarely use it because it often fixes things that I don't want fixed. For example, it finds orange to be unnatural and will lessen the amount of orange for you no matter how much orange is supposed to be there. So I do the settings manually.

Lately, I have also been doing some extra processing to my photos. These extra steps include exaggerating focus, colour saturation and contrast. With just a few changes, a basic photo can have much more character. I'll show some examples...

Never Ready For My Closeup

I'm more of a background kind of person. Except not making them; I suck at that. But backgrounds are important! They need to be there to give the foreground some support. They need to look good without drawing attention. That's a tough task, especially without talent or knowledge. That's why I created about 30 potential background for napaJapan.com and ended up scrapping all of them in favour of one that Dennis had. It's just not my forte. Hell, I don't even have a forte and that one sticks out as being particularly NOT.

So now I've figured out a few things about the Blogger template and I've uploaded several backgrounds to the napaJapan server to be used here. I did another jumble of products, but I made them tiling, then I faded them to almost black and put some blue over top. It's like a nice dark blue background, but with Kit Kat!

Oh, and completely unrelated, but I made an poster-style image of a Majesty Ukulele for Yusuke. It's one I took of Virginia's custom "hummingbird" model a few years ago. I masked it out and laid it on a bed of hydrangea ("ajisai" in Japanese, which also happens to be a great sushi restaurant). I think it looks pretty good. He may disagree, but I'm guessing he's too busy and too tired to care enough to complain at the moment.

That ukulele, by the way, is one of the nicest sounding ukes I've ever heard. Loud, rich, clear tone and a very sweet sound. It blew me away when I heard it last month. I thought my ukulele was in a league of its own and I thought it was mostly because it's a tenor, but apparently I was wrong.

UPDATE: I was right. Yusuke didn't like it.

UPDATE 2: After sending a version without the logo or background, he changed his mind!

UPDATE 3: The photo is on the MusicFair website.