I ended up just going through Lightroom and browsing through a bunch of old photos. I ended up finding this one of my old college/highschool roommate, Bernard, who I’ve known since 6th grade. Very chill guy. I remember a phase we went through when we would always try to prank other kids in our dorm. It was pretty easy, too: all you need to do is tape the door and wait till they left the room. I forgot what we did to them after they left, but I bet it was epic.

Oh, and at choice times we also stayed up deep into the night playing a peculiar mini computer game called Icy Tower, which involved a little guy with an afro jumping around yelling “ashimidaaaa!” … Surprisingly, I don’t have too much more to say about that.

Finally, if you’ve ever played online poker in the last few years there’s a good chance Bernard has taken money from you, as he is currently a professional poker player. I bet you didn’t see that coming!

Post-processing
I kind of cheated for this photo because I had already post-processed it once before. However, after revisiting I decided it was bad, so I completely re-did it.

1. Cropped a weird aspect ratio because I neglected to frame it right when I took it
2. Healing brushed the table.
3. Played with Selective color. Changed the color of the table to make it more green, and changed Bernard’s shirt color to red to contrast it more with the table and give some company to the pool ball.
4. Added contrast with Curves
5. Corrected skin tone with selective Hue/Saturation. If he was a girl I would use Topaz Clean to clean up the skin a bit but alas… he is not a girl
6. Burned the edges

And that’s it!

Before and After

So I grab my 40D and jump into the car to go take a couple of photos at our neighborhood park. When I get there I discover that I should have just walked because there’s nowhere to park my car. I end up stopping smack in the middle of the narrow street before waltzing off to take a couple of pictures as the daylight slowly but surely crept away. A couple of bystanders seemed to think I was a tourist.

It’s kind of sad – I haven’t gone to that park in a while, especially not during the cold months, and it’s definitely not as nice as it was last time. It used to be completely green, with little waterfalls and spouts streaming from a large pond surrounded by winding trails and tall trees. Now it seems overrun with pollution, construction vehicles, and a drab ambience. It’s almost as if someone took that scene and dropped a solid brown layer set to Color blend mode on it. (You know you spend too much time in Photoshop when it creeps into your analogies.)

Anyways, I grabbed this shot right before the sun set for the day. I later tried to get one from a better angle but the beautiful reds and oranges had already degenerated into a drab gray. I like this shot’s colors, but the composition could be better.

Post-processing
I tried to go for a more artsy interpretation of this photo. To that end I applied extreme contrast, high saturation, and used some creative filters to get the final result. It might be a bit much for some, but I like the result that I got here and of course my opinions are always right.

1. I first applied a saturation adjustment layer and selectively increased the saturation of the orange/reds and blues in the sky to bring out the contrast
2. Duplicated layer, set blend mode to Overlay at 70% opacity.
3. Topaz Adjust to increase detail and cloud definition + a tiny bit of adaptive exposure
4. Masked in some Topaz Simplify to de-emphasize the fine detail of the trees

Before and After

I first started “playing” guitar back in college/high school (long story), where I would go to a couple of friends’ rooms and mess around on their guitar. Eventually I got a cheap one of my own and I would constantly practice “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to the chagrin of my neighbors. In fact, I wouldn’t only play the notes on the guitar – I would belt out the lyrics too. The best part is that I could never hit the high note in that song, so each time I started playing everyone in earshot would duck for cover. (That’s an exaggeration… I think.) I think there might be a couple of videos of me doing that still floating around. Oh well, fun times.

Post-Processing
Post on this photo was somewhat involved. I chose to take it in a more “artistic” direction, so Topaz Simplify played a big role in the outcome. Here are the steps I took to achieve the final outcome:

1. Created and saved mask of the guitar using Topaz ReMask
2. Digitally cleaned up scratches and some dirty spots
3. Cleaned up and darkened background
4. Topaz Simplify modified BuzSim preset to create vibrant colors and “artistic” guitar look.

Enjoy.

Before and After

I took this today at a car show in Plano called the Coffee and Cars something or other at Classic BMW. All throughout the car show I couldn’t help but think that it’s a fantastic idea for that dealership: they get a bunch of car enthusiasts walking around their dealership for four hours on a nice Saturday morning, without dropping a single dollar in advertising. There were a ton of people there, and a lot of insanely expensive cars.

In my 20 minutes of walking around, I saw two Bentleys, two Lamborghinis, one Aston Martin, one Ferrari, 10+ Porsches, lots of classic cars that I’m not familiar with… and of course like 400 shiny BMWs. (No Maseratis though, and no Bugatti Veyron.) Now, I’m very happy with my car (which perhaps will be the subject of a future post), but this massive display of disposable wealth made me want to trade it in immediately and start eating cardboard in the hopes of saving enough to afford one-twelfth of any one of these cars. There was a woman there who apparently owned 11 of the high-end, luxury cars, and was saying stuff like “Yeah, the Aston Martin is a bit boring, I prefer the Bentley for daily driving.” Absolutely insane!

While walking around, I’ve come to the conclusion that my new dream car is the Audi R8. It used to be the Lamborghini Murcielago, but after taking a look in real life, without the airbrush, it doesn’t really look all that special. There’s just something about the R8 that stirs something within me, even though it only packs 420 horses for 100k+. I don’t know what it is – all I know is that the R8 is epic. Perhaps it is because I saw this a long time ago:

Mmm. One can dream.

Post-Processing
I took a long time on this photo, because I am much worse at car retouches than people or landscape. It’s still not exactly where I want it, but I spent a couple of hours on it and don’t have any more time. If I did, though, I would definitely add a new background, fix up the windows a bit, and clean up some more reflections. The background would probably be my top priority, as the two guys in the current background kind of kills the whole photo

Anyways, here are the steps I took for this photo:

1. Drastic Levels adjustment (I didn’t notice I used spot metering for this shot until later. The photo came out really underexposed)
2. Topaz DeNoise for noise reduction.
3. Healing brush and clone stamp for all the specular highlights on the car body
4. Removed major reflections in the side panel behind door
5. Replaced windshields with… wait for it… a linear gradient! This is one area I need work on. I tried a bunch of different methods to adequately retouch the windows, and most of them failed miserably.

I did easily mask the car out with ReMask, but couldn’t create an adequate background to put it on. Perhaps I will revisit this photo later and find it a more impressive habitat.

EDIT: I took a bit of time and put in a more acceptable background.

Before and After

I took this photo back in December 26, 2008 when I went with my family to visit relatives in Houston. You know, it was one of those huge Asian get togethers with lots of hugging, Asian food, and karaoke. It was pretty fun and great to see everyone, except for one hitch. At this particular gathering, one poor misled soul had deemed it a good idea to gift my brother with a “Nerf N-Strike Longshot CS-6″. In case you’re not a Nerf gun connoisseur, this thing is like three feet long of plastic death. Not too many real guns are even that long.

Anyways, there’s really two ways to interpret this photo. Since it’s been more than a year, I forgot which version is true, so you’ll have to decide for yourself. Here they are:

1. Mom and Billy are caught in a mesmerizing kindred embrace – a beautiful and ephemeral thing that is a treasure to see and a blessing to capture; or
2. Mom confiscated Billy’s Nerf gun and he’s trying to schmooze it back.

Choose wisely!

Post-processing
This photo came out pretty decent from the camera, I only had to do some minor adjustments to make it pop out a bit. I didn’t, however, want it to look artificial or too processed, so I didn’t take it too far. Here are the steps I took to post-process this photo:

1. Cropped and straightened in Lightroom
2. Levels
3. Selective Topaz Adjust on the subjects only, taking care not to mask in any halos. It was the Portrait Drama preset at 30-40% opacity.
4. Minor spot healing brush work on skin
5. Minor dodge and burning on skin to even out texture and facial lines

Mom and Son, Before and After

So here’s the deal. I’m going to post-process and post at least one photo a day, starting from today. This is partly to satisfy my momentary photography craving, but also so I can improve my photography as well. Although I’m technically competent with photography and Photoshop, I’ll be the first to admit that the creativity isn’t up to the standards I’m going for. So this guaranteed one photo a day will help me both maintain a good photography outlet and ensure that I’m always improving my photography.

So it doesn’t matter whether I take the photo on my Canon 40D or my iPhone, as long as I post-process and post one photo a day without skipping a day – evar. I realize too many of these types of things fail for too many people, but that’s not going to happen here.

I’ll also write random thoughts whenever I feel like it about assorted other stuff. Okay, cool, go!