A masking technique I like to use... tell me what you think

[alkaline9]

So I often find that for one reason or another I'm not happy with my photos as they come out of my digital camera. I often use my favorite program Paint Shop Pro to "mess" with them. There are lots of cool filters but I even find that they don't always make the photo any better... at least not the whole photo.

What I like to do is (especially ground + sky photos) use one filter on 1/2 the photo and another filter on the other 1/2 and then fade them into each other. I'll show you an example after I explain it a little. For those not familiar with masking, it can be your best friend. You can mask out things you don't want, or in this case mask so that one image begins to fade away into the other.

My process, for those who would like to try, is to start with an image that I'm not too happy with, like this one. It has decent composition, but the color just isn't fun enough.


Then I go to my filters in my graphics program and modify 2 different versions of the photo. I talk about some downloadable filters here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=280&topic_id=11592&mesg_id=11616

The two filters I used here are called "Anvil" and "Copper". The Anvil was used to darken the sky and the Copper was used to change the color of the corn stalks. Like this:


Now I wouldn't be happy with either one of these modified photos as a final product, so this is where the masking comes in. I really like the dark sky on the one and the copper corn on the other, so I use a "mask" which is simply another image the same dimensions as the 2 modified photos. Only the mask uses black and white to determine which part of the photo is to be seen or masked. White in the mask means show the original, and black means make the original transparent. As you will see my mask is a simple flood-fill from white to black, top to bottom. Any gray colors between white and black make the image more or less transparent, but still visible. So here is my mask file:


Now once I apply the mask to one of the images (the black sky one) it will make whatever is in the white part of the mask more visible (top) and whatever is in the black part of the mask more transparent (bottom). Essentially it does this to the image:


Now if I overlay this on top of the copper image it appears that I have a dark sky fading into the copper corn.... which I think just looks a lot cooler! The original was good, but this adds a twist of digital manipulation. This is the final product:


If you don't like changing the corn stalks to copper color, you could simply use the original and overlay the dark sky on top of it. It would look like this (which I think still looks better than the original):


This is a technique that I kind of just found one day while fooling around, but I thought it was cool enough to share. If you like the idea give it a try. It has really helped me produce some decent images from otherwise boring (or overexposed, underexposed, etc) photos.

Questions? Comments?

[Blue_In_AK]

1. Well, aren't you the clever one?

I have PSP, as well, so perhaps I should learn some of this stuff. Thanks for the tips.

[alkaline9]

2. honestly, im a computer geek with free time at work :-)

and i have always pirated PSP... but now I love it (and I should pay for it).

[Blue_In_AK]

3. I wish I were a computer geek...

I've been working on computers for years, but mostly doing word processing. (I was a legal secretary for 25 years and now type court transcripts at home.) These graphics programs are a whole new thing for me.