Post a Disney picture a day

[Suiteliferoxs]

I'm loving these pictures!!

[disneylady]

"The British Invasion"..........A BEATLES Tribute Band
IN EPCOT.......WORLD SHOWCASE....UK

[turkeymama]

I love these guys in Spectromagic.

[MainStreet, USA]

Ok... this time I did a little touching up digitally. Makes for a pretty cool effect, I think.

Hollywood Tower Hotel:



Opinions???

[2tinners]

Awesome Picture.

[bigbrian-nc.com]

heres a different look at Spaceship earth once again from that 2001 trip report:



http://www.bigbrian-nc.com/2001AUG/02.htm

[MainStreet, USA]

Love the squirrel in that last one, Brian!

[trickster]

Ok... this time I did a little touching up digitally. Makes for a pretty cool effect, I think.

Hollywood Tower Hotel:



Opinions???

It looks really good!!

[bigbrian-nc.com]

Love the squirrel in that last one, Brian!

Thank ya' Don, in that Tower one, just for comparison could we see the original image or images you used? I can do a little when it comes to photo editing, and would like to hear a bit more about how you edited the image.

[MainStreet, USA]

Voila!... le Original!




I used Gimp (it's a free download, if you're interested) for the editing. I'm not terribly good with it, and most of my editing is more or less a system of trial and error - I select an option, and play around with it until it looks good. If I decide that it looked better before I touched whatever it was I touched, I undo the damage.

In the case of this picture, I originally took the picture because a nasty set of storm clouds were hovering off in the distance of the tower and it looked pretty sweet, so I tried to capture the mood of the ominous tower looming in the foreground with big, dark, menacing clouds lingering just behind. But my little point-and-shoot camera with all it's silly little auto functions (I can't afford the big fancy SLRs with all the nit-picky manual options) did what it was designed to do in a case of lower light situations, and automatically lightened the entire scene, making the sky look light, the clouds far less threatening, and just put a sort of light film-like look over the hotel and the trees in the foreground. My goal in editing this one was to darken the sky and clouds, and to remove that film from the building and trees to make them look sharp and stand out against the sky.

I don't remember all of the steps I took, but knowing my usual pattern for playing around with my pictures, I can pretty much recreate my steps. I probably went first to tools > color tools and then and started playing around with the options in there. More than likely, I first tried the brightness-contrast controls, and realized that although I could remove that light film from the building and trees and improve the contrast to about what I wanted, the sky actually looked blue and almost nice out. So I abandonded that, went to the curves tool, and started playing there. I don't even know what that tool is supposed to do, but I know it messes with the lighting and colors pretty good, and through some trial and error, you can get some pretty creepy, ghastly colors. I played with that and got some pretty cool results, but finally decided on one that made the reds, blacks, and white colors in the building really stand out, and almost highlighted the edge of the building against the sky in a ghastly sort of halo of thin white light. The clouds in the background turned almost reddish, and what little sky that shown through them was dark grey.

Deciding I liked the effect, I saved a copy like that and went on my merry way for the day. Then yesterday, trying to decide which picture to post for the day, I started looking at my edited copy of this picture again. I was pretty satisfied, but I wanted to try and see if I couldn't milk just a bit more color out of it by editing the already edited picture. This time all I did was go back into the brighteness-contrast options, cranked up the contrast, and noticed that the building looked infinitely sharper and the colors were much more pronounced. I then slid the brightness level down a bit and watched the sky grow darker and the difference in the clouds and sky color grow more evident as well. I played with it for a bit until I found a medium I was happy with, saved it again, and that is the copy you see in my previous post.

Like I said, I'm not very good at this photo editing stuff. I just play around with it until I'm either happy with it or I chose to give up. I don't know if this description will help at all, but to the best of my knowledge that is about how I got it done.

[disneylady]

OFF KILTER.......................WS...CANADA.....ENTER TAINMENT
.......EPCOT

[Disney05]

Ahhh! Old Key West!

[flutter]

OFF KILTER.......................WS...CANADA.....ENTER TAINMENT
.......EPCOT

I love those men in skirts

[flutter]

[disneydame2004]

Just a reminder that the rules of the thread, which can be found in the first post, state that the photo you post must be yours, from your own camera.