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Two of
the girls promoting PTT at the 2011 Thailand International Motor
Expo. This was actually the first photo I took when I walked in
the door, yet nine years later as I redesign and streamline this
gallery it still stands, but only after I spent five hours
photoshopping. Many of you have wondered if I photoshop my
images and some of you think that my images couldn't be this
beautiful unless I "created" them in photoshop. The answer is
that for 95% of my landscape photos I do very minimal
photoshopping, and by that I mean that I crop almost every
image, do perhaps a slight exposure adjustment and a small bump
in color. I try to keep things like color adjustments within the
bounds of what I feel is believable. I once paged through a book
where the photographer said that all of his colors were real and
in case you didn't believe it, he explained that what made his
color so outstanding was the special lighting and his perfect
timing. He probably stated the truth, but his editor destroyed
the integrity of his work with a total exaggeration of his
colors. I have photographed the same places he did in every kind
of light for 30 years and I know what reality is, and so I know
his colors were way oversaturated, something you find a lot in
both books and on the internet. I said that for 95% of my photos
I do very minimal photoshopping. There have been exceptions
wherein I spent many hours photoshopping. These girls are
incredibly beautiful but I did not have the advantage of a
studio and had to photograph them "as is". At the motor shows I
get all kinds of crazy light and tons of people competing for
the same photos making much of my work very difficult. I
have had this photo on my website for nine years and every time
I looked at it the the shadows behind the girls bothered me. So
today while I was going through and bringing some of my pages up
to date I decided once and for all to take those shadows out of
this image. Once I got started I couldn't help but want to touch
up a few other things as well. I'm not an expert at
photoshopping, so I do everthing manually, sometimes painting in
pixel by pixel, add to that I am a perfectionist, which explains
why it took me 5 hours. In my nature photography about the most
I usually do is perhaps remove a small piece of litter from the
beach. If an image needs much more than that, I usually just
find another photo that I like equally as well that doesn't need
any work. Like I said there are a few exceptions. One is "Quiet
Morning" (click here). Here
rather than use a panorama camera I did many takes and then
tried to stitch them together in Photoshop. Photoshop did a
terrible job of bringing the edges together, so I worked on the
photo for about two weeks painting in and fixing the gaps, often
one pixel at a time. |
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