This sunset was shot in Montego Bay, Jamaica. It was taken in 2004 with an early digital camera. In those days memory cards cost 240 times what they do today. In fact the two 256MB cards I used almost cost as much as the camera I used then. In order to save space I was forced to use significant jpeg compression. The more a jpeg is compressed the more speckling occurs. This can be seen best in the dark areas of the left image below. Unfortunately this type of distortion makes it almost impossible to submit images for stock photography. If you want to sell your images always save them at the highest quality. Fortunately as this blog only needs images 800 pixels wide by the time the resolution is reduced the speckling is effectively eliminated. This can be seen in the right image below. The moral of this story is only compress your jpegs if you plan to put them on the web and nowhere else.

It took 2 satellites 16 days to create the original image.  Fortunately it is in the public domain so It is fine to use it. Rather than the traditional Blue Marble I wanted to age the earth and give it an apocalyptic look. I used adjustment layers with masks to alter different areas of the planet. I then reduced the opacity of each layer until they looked suitably polluted or deforested.

This is an old photo of a lizard in Jamaica. The original image had a low resolution and was heavily compressed. Not much good for anything except it did have good outline of the lizard on a plain background. I started by doubling the resolution of the image. Normally this would not get you anywhere but then I used Fractalius which effectively redraws the image with new detail. I ran it several times to get the different parts of the lizard to look right. I then used masks on each layer to build up the final image.

This image from Jamaica is one of my very first stock photos. I received an automated email from dreamstime agency saying “image has been online for more than 4 years with no downloads up to the present” and giving me the option of giving it away for free which I did. I still like the shot so I decided to give it the once over in Photoshop to see what would happen. I applied vignette to darken the edges and centre the focus. Then shamelessly went about boosting hues and generally adding interest. Original Free Image.

This was taken on the West coast of Jamaica in a place called Negril. The Photoshop layers I used to build up the image are below.

This shot was taken in Negril in Jamaica. The sunset was not that interesting so I decided to try out a technique called split toning I saw on this blog. Split toning works by making the shadows one colour and the highlights another. This used to be done by developing with different combinations of chemicals. In the digital age its a lot simpler. Andrew Briggs used Lightrooms split toning tools for his image. I don’t have Lightroom so I downloaded some photoshop actions instead. Actions are a way of automating tasks to save time. The split toning actions had several different options so I couldn’t resist building up several layers with different split toning colours then mixing them together with different (blending modes) to create some really strong colours.

This shot was taken on the west coast of Jamaica. The image did not need much doing to it due to the type of camera it was taken on. I shot it with a compact camera bought in 2004. It is very similar to the type of camera you would find in a mobile phone today. These types of cameras produce images which are ready to use. Contrast, Sharpening and Colour Saturation are all applied to the image before the camera saves the jpeg. A DSLR has different aims for an image it produces. Processing will still be done in camera if you choose to save as a jpeg but the camera is designed to reduce noise and preserve detail in highlights and shadows. The resulting image will look a little flatter but it is far more of a workable when it gets into Photoshop. This image therefore only needed a subtle tone curve to bring out the colours. The relationship between tone curve and colour saturation will have to wait for another post.