The Rest of the Story

It was a warm sunny afternoon when we arrived at Fitzwilliam Park in Portland, Maine.  Fog swirled around the rocky point, obscuring the busy harbor, creating an ever-changing vignette around the lighthouse. Surf relentlessly pounded the cliffs and the autumn blooming plants and Rosa rugosas were gloriously colorful. Using my iPhone, I included sea and shore in several images and then concentrated on just capturing the lighthouse.

Using both Snapseed and Lightroom, I processed my original image, cropping and straightening it and using various sliders to get the effect I wanted.  There are several plug-ins that work with the traditional image post-processing applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop.

I thought I was done… and THEN… I remembered camera club’s topic for the week was “monochrome and/or creative” and I needed at least one image. So, I reworked the image, using Nik Software Silver Effects Pro’s filters, converting the image to black and white. If I wish to convert a color image to black and white, while using Lightroom or Photoshop, I use the free version of Nik Software’s Silver Effects Pro plug-in. This application/plug-in gives me more than 30 variable black and white filters to consider, each with multiple options.

That was a disaster! The entire foreground went dark and muddy, requiring re-cropping the image, and lightening the foreground plants to restore detail. Then I selected one of the sepia filters. This did the trick, giving the image a totally different mood from the original.

Afterwards, using filters from two smart phone apps, Mextures and Distressed, I achieved an entirely different feeling by sending the image back and forth between my laptop applications and iPhone via airdrop, working on the image until satisfied. If I can’t get the effect I want, or I am unable to make a satisfactory correction to my image with the applications on my desktop, I airdrop my image to my phone via Bluetooth and then process the image with one of several smartphone apps such as Snapseed , TouchRetouch, Mextures, and/or Distressed. I save each version of the image into my phone’s camera roll as it is changed, and then evaluate all of the versions by airdropping them back to my laptop, discarding the ones that do not please me. To share files between my laptop and my iPhone, I set both gadgets up on the same wi-fi network and verify that they can see each other in the Bluetooth. Then I airdrop my images back and forth between the two gadgets. Airdrop only works between apple products, but the Microsoft equivalent to airdrop is called Nearshare.

What do you think?? 

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