More editing fun

I take a TON of photos, but I've always been a little afraid to do much more than crop them. Had some fun this week playing with some of the editing options in Photoshop CS2....not sure how often I'd use them, but it was fun to try them out! First....here's an edit of a shot I took a long time ago while taking the ferry across Lake Champlain. I like the original well enough....but I played with it a little and really liked the result I got using the "Neon Glow" option.



Next is a portrait I took of my son Cody....I still don't really know how I got the White Balance so wrong. I use a tool called the Expodisc to help set custom WB before every series of shots in changing lighting conditions. Apparently I got something wrong this time. And.....I didn't shoot in RAW even though I could have. DAMN!! Well, all I could do was play with the RGB levels and get it close to acceptable. Still not good enough to print I don't think, but it gives an idea of what can be done by hand....even by a hack.




Then I wanted to try something a little more challenging. I shot a John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band (the guys that did the soundtrack for the Eddie & The Cruisers movies) concert this summer and got a few really good shots. I liked this shot of Michael "Tunes" Antunes, Cafferty's sax player. Last week I posted a couple examples where I cut a player from one background and posted it onto another. So.....for this shot, I wanted to really make the person stand out on the same background I had cut him from. I found a cool way to do that, using the Artistic/Plastic Wrap option in CS2. I created a duplicate copy of the original and then applied the Plastic Wrap.. then I cut "Tunes" from the background using the eraser tool. Once I had that done cleanly, I dragged him back on to the original and covered his original position. Whatcha think?