Filtering through Italy

Portrait

This is the best portrait shot I got this week, it was taken as the sun was setting. The only difficulty was that my subject was not too happy with being photographed, but I managed to get a few really good shots. I tried to make some adjustments in Photoshop to make it  look more dramatic, but I didn't like what I got so I just posted the original photo. 

Cloning, Text Effects

I saw this cool tutorial on the internet for adjusting an old and faded photo. I thought it was really cool and wanted to try it myself, so the above two photos show this. I used mostly the clone tool to get rid of the missing parts, and to blend the different tones in the background, so it looks like the original. I spent a good few hours, but did not want to give up. There are probably other ways of retouching this photo, but using the clone tool has been enormous help for me.



The text tool was really easy to use, I was able to modify the text into different shapes and give it various effects. In the first photo I used the shape button from the Text tool Options bar, resized the text and applied a Color Dodge blending mode.







In the second photo I actually followed the video tutorial for applying a watermark. I just typed the text, resized and rotated it, then applied the Bevel and Emboss layer style.

Filters

I just realized when adding this week's photos that all of them include water and it really was not intentional. I think it's funny...
All right, filters were a lot of fun to play with and it's amazing the effects you can obtain when applying them. The first photo is of a sail boat on the lake, I used the zoom at full length to capture this and the photo came out with a lot of noise. So, I applied the Reduce Noise filter first and then the Stylize > Extrude filter to come to the final result.

The second photo was taken on Church Street, on one of the days the water fountain was actually working. I applied two filters to this image and those are Cutout and Poster Edge, both found under the Artistic group. I think the final photo looks a little cartoonish, or like it was hand-colored, but the effect is great.

Dodge and Burn

Here I used the Dodge and Burn tools... I started by adding a layer with the blending mode set to Overlay and filled it with neutral gray. I then took a brush with soft edges to darken some of the color in the wood covering the dock as well as the pillars. I added a dark blue gradient which starts at the top of the photo and fades to clear as it goes down, giving the sky a little more color.
Once done, I took a look at the modified photo and the dock seemed too dark, so I changed the blending mode of the layer from Overlay to Soft Light. The changes are more subtle now, but still visible.