Horses and a Car

by João
(São Gonçalo, RJ, Brazil)

I just saw this unusual scene and took a picture of it. At home, however, I "tortured" Photoshop until it looked like as I wanted.

The original version had problems with saturation (it was almost greyscale!) Photoshop did a nice work for me ;)


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João’s photo here is a nice pleasant scene, which again illustrates the point that if you don’t have your camera with you, you can’t take any photos. And you never know what’s around the next corner.

It would be interesting to see the "before" photo too, as João mentions, he needed to torture it in Photoshop.

And at this point I’d like to add a personal comment – I often hear photographers pour scorn on images that have been ‘Photoshopped’. I think this is unfair. These people seem to forget that before we had digital photography we still used to manipulate images.

We did it in the darkroom; and we boosted contrast, saturated colours, dodged and burned areas of our photos. Basically, most of the things that digital photographers do today. The only difference is that back then it was more difficult to do. All Photoshop has done is put darkroom techniques into the hands of all photographers.

Anyway, enough of my ranting! I wanted to raise that with João’s image because he has done in Photoshop what any half decent photographer would have done in the darkroom anyway – so well done João!

I suspect his editing has proved its worth. The photo we have here is bright and colourful – imagine if it had been more greyscale. It would have lost any impact.

I find the scene interesting, so well done for spotting it. There is only really one area where I am holding back here – the telegraph pole and wires.

I appreciate João couldn’t move them when he took the photo, but I just wonder if a little use of the clone stamp tool to erase them would give us a better photo (read more about using the clone stamp tool to repair photos here).

All in all though, nice photo, and thanks João for your submission.

(sorry about the rant!)

Ed.

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