Photo Tutorial: Watercolor Waterfall
Posted on November 27, 2009 by Andy in Featured Photoglers | 1 Comment
By Andy Beal
I took this at the lookout at Linville Falls, NC.
I used my iPhone and stitched together about 6 shots with the Autostitch app. Unfortunately, I was holding the leash of a wiener dog at the time, so couldn’t keep still–hence the images were blurry.
Instead of throwing out the combined image, I just simply went over the top with Aperture. I boosted sharpness, contrast, saturation, vibrancy, colors, shadows–you name it.
(I’d tell you the precise enhancements, but that’s not the purpose of sharing this image. Instead, I want to show you what can be accomplished when you get creative. Photoshop, iPhoto, Picasa all have similar adjustments you can make.)
The result? Something salvageable that looks like some kind of watercolor or oil painting.
The next time you take a “bad” photo, try playing around with your photo software and see if you can get something interesting from it! Then add it to the Photogler Flickr group so we can all see it! 
View Andy Beal’s Flickr Photostream
One Response to “Photo Tutorial: Watercolor Waterfall”
Leave a Reply
Great point on the salvageable comment. I’ve been experimenting with that a little, too, using the Topaz Adjust plugin. It’s been helpful for when I have older images that I wish I had shot as HDR at the time and for others where the sharpness isn’t as good as I had liked.