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I didn't get much sleep last night thanks to mocha_mephooki.

He gave me a copy of Photoshop CS2. I was up until midnight going through the very nice sharpening tutorial starts at Ron Bigelow's page here. I haven't yet progressed beyond familiarizing myself with the settings of the unsharp mask filter, but I think that this is something that I'm going to get deeply into.

Photography and pictures editing is fast becoming my latest obession. I'm planning to try my hand at a few of the photography contests and challenges out there online, and maybe finding some photo communities on Livejournal that catch my interest. I still want to get some photos and writing together for a sort of photojournalism of Midwest urban decay project too, but the web design portion is kind of intimidating to me.

I took my first portrait with the new 50mm lens, which came out so nicely. at f1.8, all the details of the face and individual strands of hair came out so beautifully, yet the DVD rack only a foot behind was pleasantly blurred into a melange of browns, blacks, and whites. I'd really like to practice and do more portrait shooting. Any takers? I'll give you copies of the resultant images. It's too bad it's too cold to do it outdoors.

Although speaking of outdoor photography, I'm thinking very seriously about using one of my days off later this month to get up stupid-early in the morning and drive out to Gary so I can photograph the Methodist church at dawn. Ideally, there'll be some snow on the ground for this to give it some extra mood. If I can get out of bed early enough two days of my vacation, I might just drive out to Bong or Petrifying Springs to take some outdoor winter photos at dawn. We'll see if my ambition holds out when the choice of walking around in freezing weather with a camera bag and fingerless gloves versus staying in a nice warm bed next to a cuddly raccoon-girl actually presents itself to me.

While poking around online, I found a website that belongs to someone who's a freelance photographer and writer, and who makes enough money at it to do it full time. It's a fun site to poke through and read, and it's also inspiring to see that it really is possible to make a living doing that sort of thing. I'm really heartened to see that there's someone out there who not only writes magazine articles and books, but who take pictures too. That's a living that I would love to make.

But now I need to go do my exercise for today (more Dance Dance) and call tybis.

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Using a very silly-cute picture of my sweetie giving me her pouty-raccoon face in front of The House on the Rock (from May of this year) as my source image, and going along with the unsharp mask tutorial I linked to in my previous entry, I spent a little time today playing with settings and tweaking.

I just had no idea that I could make such a difference in an image! Photoshop always seemed like something that only 'experts' knew how to use, but with just a little bit of internet tutelage and some time invested, I think I can really learn this. In light of the fact that I'm just starting out now, I can't imagine what kind of nifty post-processing I'll be able to do once I have a year or two in.

But here, here; take a look. There are two 800 by 800 pixel images under the cut. The first one is the unsharpened original, and the second one is after judicious application of unsharp mask in Photoshop. It's hard to say how well this would turn out in print without having a photo printer to test it on (I may have to pick one of those up when I can manage to). It may be a little over sharpened, particularly on the hood of her sweater, but I'm just so amazed that the realm of picture touch-up is starting to open up to me!

( click for pictures )

On a related note, I think I'm going to have to find a tool to start watermarking my images. Any thoughts?