Assignment 6: Landscape and Nature

Sandra Yen

Requirement 2: Improve on Nature with Photoshop.

Here is another picture from the dish. My eyes were drawn to this tuft of yellow flowers with a dead tree trunk sticking out in the middle of it. This looked like something that didn't really fit in with its surroundings, which really made me want to take a picture of it.

I wanted to capture most of the picture in focus, so I set the aperture number to f/7.1 with aperture priority, and so the shutter speed was automatically set to be 1/160 s. I wanted the subject of the picture to be the flowers PLUS that dead tree that unexpectedly protrudes out in the middle of the bed of flowers.

In Photoshop, I first increased the contrast of the whole image to make everything look more vibrant and alive. I then created another layer of the image to make my local edit: making the flowers be the only element of color. But before doing that, I made the bottom layer all black and white.

I did this because it was the only way to get the flowers to stand out against the greenness of its stems, the greenness of the grass, and the greenness of the trees in the back. I created a layer of the whole image, selected a color range (the yellow), and then I selected its inverse and cut that out, leaving only the yellow flowers in color. I also cropped the image to get rid of some of the useless areas of grass and sky.