365 ~ 2013: Day 8

Part of my photography journey is to learn from others.  One of the perks of being a member at The SOPHA is that I get to join in on First Friday, a peer image review night!  I have gone twice now and both times I walked away with some great feedback both positive and constructive, with tips to improve my image.  Aside for the feedback I am also learning what to "look" for that come across as "distracting" in an image, like a stray hair or crack in the wall that can easily be removed in post.  I hope that the more I attend these reviews the more I will learn and the more I will improve.

So taking the advice from my peers, I did a re-shoot of my cozy socks image.  The feedback was to make the toes be the focus (you can see from the before image that the bottom part of the socks is where the focus is), and clone in some more green in the top left corner, as well as remove the white glow from the bottom left.  Also someone made the suggestion to "color match" the green in the socks to the green in the tree.  What a perfect opportunity to learn something new in Photoshop!  

So for comparison; here is the BEFORE image.  Since the focus is not something I can fix in post I needed to actually retake the image.

BEFORE

Here is the retake.  Focus is on the toes, the green is cloned to the top and fills the space evenly, and I color matched the greens.

AFTER

So you can get a sense of what I did to change the color, there may or may not be an easier/faster way to do what I did, but I don't have a strong background in PS and used the first tutorial that I came across in google!

I love the bokeh in the after image and think the color match was great tip and I'm glad I tried it out!  However, I like the overall composition better in the original image and really wish I paid more attention to where the focus was when I originally shot it so then I could have made these changes to the original image.  Oh well, live and learn!  And that is exactly the point of this journey.