The original photograph was taken by Kerim Okten. I knew as soon as I saw this image online it would be one of the defining images of the London Riots. Sure enough it was used by The Daily Star, Daily Mail, i, Daily Express, The Telegraph, The Sun and the BBC as a backdrop for their newsreaders. Its a powerful shot but I did not want to help glamorise what is ultimately pointless destruction. I’ve added some elements in an attempt to change the message.

THE RIOTERS PRAYER
Our father, who art in prison, only mum knows his name, thy Riots come, read it in the sun, in Birmingham, as it is in London, give us this day our Welfare bread & forgive us our looting, as we’re happy 2 loot those who defend stuff against us, lead us not into employment but deliver us free housing, 4 thine is the Spliff, the Blackberry & the Lager, forever & ever…Innit

These are the Al Hassan and Al Rifa’i Mosques of Cairo in Egypt. The image was created from two separate exposures stitched together in Photoshop. A mask of the sky was made to add some blue however it clashed with the warm tones of the buildings. By changing the blend mode to Exclusion the blue sky layer added a soft brown which looked like a dust storm and balanced with the other colours in the image.

This simple use of spot colour is achieved by painting black on the layer mask of a Black & White layer. The Hue/Saturation layer above was used to make the ladybird nice and red. It was a little orange in the original capture. Vignette was achieved using a gradient layer and lens correction.

This was taken near Luxor in Egypt. The image was processed using Photoshops Camera RAW developer. The effect was created using the inbuilt split toning feature in Camera RAW. You access the panel by clicking on the icon which looks like an = sign after you open your RAW file. It’s useful to know when adjusting the saturation slider it acts just like an opacity slider. You can blend it between original image colour and the hues you have set for the highlights and shadows. The balance slider is really a midpoint. It defines the crossover between highlight and shadow. In this case a warm hue was added to the highlights to give the effect of sunset. A subtle blue was added to the shadows. Finally a vignetting was added.

This sunrise was taken on a balloon flight over the west bank of the Nile near Luxor in Egypt. In order to compensate for the cameras White Balance Guess a colour balance layer was used to bring back the sunrise colours. An advantage of using this method is the Highlights, Midtones and Shadows can be adjusted individually. This means you can control the colours in the dark foreground and the bright sky separately.

This is Tahrir Square in Egypt. This part of Cairo saw the start of the Pro Democracy marches which ended Hosni Mubarak’s reign and started a chain reaction which is now sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. When I took this image in 2007 I was spotted by someone in the government building on the right. A short while later I was politely asked to stop taking pictures. Hopefully the new regime will allow greater freedom for the Egyptian people.

I have never been lucky enough to see a Red Squirrel in the UK. The closest I could get was to disguise one of our common gray squirrels. I used liquify to change the shape of the face and lengthen the ears. A new layer with a blend mode set to color is used to change the fur to a woody brown hue while keeping the texture.

This is Indigo Dye and Powdered spices in Aswan Market, Egypt. If you recognise the powders please leave a comment so I can give more accurate keywords. In most cases stock agencies discourage too much photoshopping as it can easily degrade the image and can make it of less use to graphic designers who will apply there own adjustments. The exception is removing distracting elements as this makes the image of more use to designers. This image has the wall on the left copied to the right to cover the busy background.

This is the Nile skyline in Egypt. To create some extra sparkle you can use a high pass layer set to hard light blend mode. Sharpening also works well to make the lights stand out. It works best if you sharpen at the very end of the process, after you have resized. If you sharpen an images at full resolution the effect will be reduced once you resize to a low resolution needed for web output.

The High Resolution version of this image was accepted at Shutterstock in a surprisingly fast 7hrs.

Happy New Year. This was taken at the Ferry Meadows firework display in the UK. The glowing effect is made by first raterizing the text. This changes it from a vector to pixels. Once in pixel you have a lot more options in photoshop. By using Gaussian blur on a copy of the text layer below you can create the glow.