Tag Archives: One Four Challenge

One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 4

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This week I dedicate my edit of the chose picture for February’s One Four challenge to the creature that made me take the picture in the first place. The shiny giant clam.

At first I didn’t realize it was a clam (I’m not at all versed in sea creatures) because I didn’t really see the shell. But it was so big, so shiny and so pretty that I decided to go for the picture. Then I posted one of the picture I took in instagram and  got a like on it from the aquarium. Visiting their instagram page was how I got to know what the creature was, as they also had a picture of it (with the blue cast! ;o).

Anyway, for this week, I again cropped the picture and changed brightness, contrast, and temperature to get to my final version, which looks like this:

OneFourFeb2016_Week4

This month, I must say the challenge was harder than I though it would be.
I picked the aquarium picture because of the fact that it was off color, but once I fixed that on week one, it was hard to decide what else to do with it.
Highlighting specific items on the original picture was fun, tough, although it made it feel like 4 different pictures, instead of 4 versions of the same one.
But maybe that’s the idea of the challenge anyways, right?

Editing the post to add a gallery with all the pictures for comparison, and a poll…

Original
Week 1 – trying to get the real colors to show
Week 2 – Highlighting the fish
Week 3 – Lavender-field-like coral
Week 4 – Shinny giant clam

 

This post was written in response to the One Four Challenge 2016 – February, hosted by Robyn. Check also my weeks 1, 2 and 3 edits.

One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 3

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This week, for my One Four challenge, I’ll again highlight a section of my picture, by cropping the image in order to show only (or mostly) the element I was to focus on.

The chosen ‘creature’ this week is a coral in green and purple that reminded me of lavender fields.

The actual name of the coral seems to be Acropora (please for the experts out there, fell more than free to correct me if I’m wrong), but I still like the call it lavender-field-like coral, just because… 😉

To show the coral well, I cropped the image, changed the temperature to remove the blue cast (like in week 1), increased the saturation and played a little with brightness and contrast until I was satisfied with the results.

I did this all before posting my Week 2 edit. Then after seeing Emilio’s comment about the lack of a focal point on my fist picture, I looked at my week 3 picture and decided to edit again, as I felt the coral as not standing out as much as I wanted to have it be the focal point (yes, I do them all more or less at the same time. Maybe not same day, but by the end of week 1 I typically have all 4 ready to be published 😉 ).

The main problem was that I wanted to highlight the purple coral, but there was another one all-green at the top of the picture that had a much brighter color, and was sort of stealing the scene. I could have tried to isolate areas and do the highlight by changing levels on each area, but that would require an app and some time I did not have. So I cropped it even more to show only the Acropora.

I’m still not 100% sure if that was really needed or not. Maybe I was just over thinking, but I’ll still stick to my edit #2. 😉

Here’s how it turned out:

OneFourFeb2016_Week3b

Lavender and green coral in Seattle Aquarium

 

This post was written in response to the One Four Challenge 2016 – February, hosted by Robyn. Check also my weeks 1 and 2 edits.

And if you’re curious to see my first edition of the week 3 image, you can find it here.

One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 2

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Back to this month’s One Four Challenge.

My intention when I took to picture was to focus mostly on the giant clam and also on the lavender-field-like coral.
But then, as I took the picture, a little red fish was passing by right on top of the clam, and sort of stole the scene, becoming one of the focus points of the image.

So today, I’m dedicating the edit to it, and highlighting the little guy even more by increasing the saturation and then isolating it as the only colored element in a black and white picture.

Here is this week’s edit.

Week 2 - Highlighting the fish

Week 2 – Highlighting the fish

This post was written in response to the One Four Challenge 2016 – February, hosted by Robyn. Check also my week 1 edit here.

One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 1

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Robyn’s One Four Challenge is back this month!!!
And once again I decided to participate.

This year, with a few changes that happened on my job, I haven’t been able to find as much time for blogging than I did last year, so I’m getting far behind with writing challenges, but the photo ones are a bit easier for me.

So it made me very happy to see the challenge coming back.

For this month I picked a picture I took recently at the Seattle Aquarium, that showed the colors quite different from what I was seeing ‘in person’. I was with friends and a bunch of kids (mine and theirs), which means I didn’t have much time to try to troubleshoot off-color pictures taken with my phone (probably the best I’d be able to do would be trying different angles, but not even that… ).

So I got the picture that didn’t reflect the actual colors, and my goal this week will be to try to make it as closer to the real thing as I can with the tools I have.

So first, here’s the original bluish picture.

Original

Original

Some of the creatures/vegetation on this aquarium were orangey/browny, but in the picture, I got mostly blues. purples and greens. The picture also looks much darker than the real stuff, probably to balance the shininess of the big clam, that was exacerbated in the picture.

By changing the temperature of the picture and adding (just) a (little) bit more brightness, I was able to get some of the orangey tones back and got a much brighter picture.

I like the way it turned out.
I would need to go back to the aquarium to see how ‘authentic’ I was able to get, but from what I remember, I believe I got close.

This is my edit.

Week 1 - trying to get the real colors to show

Week 1 – trying to get the real colors to show

 

This post was written in response to the One Four Challenge 2016 – February, hosted by Robyn

Wordfull Tuesday before a Wordless Wednesday

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I have recently (July) discovered the One Four Challenge, promoted by Robin, in which we are supposed to take a picture and edit it 4 different ways, posting an edit per week during the month.

I participated on July, then August was what she calls Review Month, and there was no challenge.

Then I participated again in September and used my planned October picture in November, as October turned out crazy and I didn’t have the time to work on that.

A couple weeks ago, I took a picture that ended up completely off and skewed, so I thought it would be a good one for the next one.

The problem is, I don’t know if there will even be a next time for the One Four Challenge. On her first November post, she said that December will be review month again, and also that she’ll rethink the challenge for 2016, possibly having a different one.

If that’s true, then November was the last one.

But I really wanted to play with the picture. And I did actually, before realizing there could potentially not be a new One Four Challenge.

So my plan for the next few weeks is to post each of my edits on a One Four Wordless Wednesday post. Because it’s wordless I won’t really describe the edits, but that’s fine. The coolest is to see how one picture can transform into so distinct ones.

So tomorrow I’ll post the original picture, as out of the camera, with no cropping, no filters, no adjustments.

Then on the following 4 weeks I’ll publish each of the 4 edits, and that shall cover the Wordless Wednesdays until the end of the year… ;o)

Logo_Small

One Four Challenge – November Week 4

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This is the fourth and last week of the One Four Challenge for November.

After last week’s post Nic suggested that I’d try GIMP. I installed it and had a quick look, but I have a confession to make. I did all my 4 edits at once at the beginning of the month and had my week 4 ready and waiting to be published already. Another confession, I wish I had more time to spend on blogging, but home, family and a full time job makes me lazy to learn new apps that have a steepish learning curve. I still want to learn GIMP, but it may take a while…

So back to my quick edits on simple apps to wrap-up the month….

This week I decided to try something different and transform my photo onto a sort of Thomas Kinkade-style ‘painting’.

It was tricky to find a way to do that using my 2 little non-fancy apps and my try and error (instead of educated attempts) to change settings around.

In the end I got what I wanted using a mix of my 2 worlds.

First, I used Photo Editor on my phone to get the painting look and feel. My first edit was to use the Oil Paint effect. Then I played around with some of the color settings, such as brightness, contrast, temperature, exposure, saturation, tint and hue. Unfortunately I didn’t take notes of my changes on these categories. But the painting style of the oil painting effect did not exactly matched Kinkade’s style, so on top of it I applied a diffuse effect by 3% only. Still not really Kinkade-ish, leaning more towards pointillism, but I liked it anyways.

The problem of editing pictures on a tiny phone is that sometimes, once I upload it to the computer, the colors (especially brightness) look a bit different. And that’s exactly what happened here.

So, once in the PC, I opened it in Fotor and decrease the brightness by 10 points and used a HK Film effect on 28% strength.

That’s how it turned out:

NovemberWeek4

 

And now, the gallery with all my edits for this month.

Original
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4

I’d love to know which one you liked the best, so feel free to vote on your favorite below:

One Four Challenge – November Week 3

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This is the third week of the One Four Challenge for November.

For this week’s edit, I decided to make it look as if the picture was taken at twilight. I must confess I did not do great here, because the dark shadows may give me away, but at least I got more evening colors (or lack thereof).

To get the feeling I wanted this week, I used the Fotor app on my PC and used the cyanotype effect with 50% strength, then I changed brightness to -42, contrast to 20, temperature to -16, tint to -28 and blur/sharpen to -25

That’s how it turned out:

NovemberWeek3

To see my previous edit, check my week 1 and week 2 posts.

One Four Challenge – November Week 2

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This is the second week of the One Four Challenge for November.

Then, for this week’s edit, I decided to make it look more like fall (or maybe end of a hot summer), with more earthy colors.

To accomplish that, I tried several different things on both Fotor on the PC and Photo Editor on my phone.
But it was really hard to change a very green picture to earthy tones, without making the house and pavement change color drastically too…

So in the end I used the Photo Editor app on my phone and changed: brightness to 9, exposure to 28, temperature to 5692, tint to -6 and tolerance to 135, and picked a hue more towards an orangy color.

That’s how it turned out:

NovemberWeek2

To see my previous edit, check week 1 post here.

One Four Challenge – November Week 1

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The picture I show here was originally planned to be used in October, but October ended up being a crazy month so I dropped some of my projects, including this one. 😦

But fear not, there is always the next month, right?

And here I am using my picture in November’s edition of the One Four Challenge…

The original picture was taken on September 27th, on the first weekend of the corn maze and pumpkin patch at Bob’s Corn Farm, in Snohomish, WA. I used my Motorola phone with the default auto settings.

NovemberOriginal

Then, for this week’s edit, I decided to make it look more summery, and used the Fotor app on my PC to change the temperature to 17, saturation to 30, contrast to -15, and brightness to 12.

That’s how it turned out:

NovemberWeek1

One-Four Challenge: September Week 4

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This is the last week for the September One-four challenge.

The images I’ll be using this month were actually created back in July, when I learned about the challenge and went crazy about creating 2 sets of images, the one I used then, and the one I’ll be using this month.

Having been so long since the editing of the pictures, I need also admit I don’t remember how exactly I edited them, except of course by the obvious. I’ll try to remember at least those obvious. All edits were made on my Android phone, using the Photo Editor app.

So here’s this week’s version:

rosesedited4

In this one I decided to use the weird effects of the app. So I use a invert color to get my magenta roses to become blue, and also a mirroring (both vertical and horizontal) effect for the caleidoscope look and feel.

So bellow you’ll fint a compilation of all 4 versions as well as the original, and a poll. Please vote on your favorite one.

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Original

One-Four Challenge: September Week 3

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This is the third week for the September One-four challenge.

The images I’ll be using this month were actually created back in July, when I learned about the challenge and went crazy about creating 2 sets of images, the one I used then, and the one I’ll be using this month.

Having been so long since the editing of the pictures, I need also admit I don’t remember how exactly I edited them, except of course by the obvious. I’ll try to remember at least those obvious. All edits were made on my Android phone, using the Photo Editor app.

So here’s this week’s version:

rosesedited3

 

This is the closest to the original picture. On this one, if I remember well, I increased saturation, added some little blur and changed the perspective, so the fence that seemed to be leaning a tiny bit to the right, changes to lean a bit to the left.

Hope you’ll like it.

One-Four Challenge: September Week 2

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This is the second week for the September One-four challenge.

As I mentioned last week, the images I’ll be using this month were actually created back in July, when I learned about the challenge and went crazy about creating 2 sets of images, the one I used then, and the one I’ll be using this month.

Having been so long since the editing of the pictures, I need also admit I don’t remember how exactly I edited them, except of course by the obvious. I’ll try to remember at least those obvious. All edits were made on my Android phone, using the Photo Editor app.

So here’s this week’s version:

rosesedited2

In picture was build on top of the previous one, keeping the vignette, which i learned some people do not like much. ;o). In this one, it doesn’t make the picture too dark, but on the other hand we can clearly see the curve, which I guess make it a little forced.
For the colors, in this one I made it monochrome, then changed the hue to a red-ish sepia-like effect.

Hope you’ll like it.

One-Four Challenge: September Week 1

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The One-four challenge is back this month after a month of review.

I’ll be honest and admit I haven’t reviewed much at all in August, and the images I’ll be using this month were actually created back in July, when I learned about the challenge and went crazy about creating 2 sets of images, the one I used then, and the one I’ll be using this month.

Having been so long since the editing of the pictures, I need also admit I don’t remember how exactly I edited them, except of course by the obvious. I’ll try to remember at least those obvious. All edits were made on my Android phone, using the Photo Editor app.

So here’s the first version:

rosesedited1

In this one, the obvious edit was the color splash, where I kept the reds only. Then I made it darker, added a vignette of dark corners and made the reds even more red (original was magenta).

Hope you’ll like it.

One Four Challenge – (Red, White and) Blue

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This is my last post for the One Four Challenge, by Captivate Me.

This is the 4th week of the month, but my 3rd post, since I missed the first one.

The picture and the theme are the same as the previous weeks: red, white and blue on a picture taken on the 4th of July, while waiting for the sun to set and the fireworks to start, in celebration of the American Independence Day.

I have already used red and white, so today I’ll go for the last color in the American flag: Blue.

 

Blue

The picture was taken with a MotoX phone, running Android KitKat.
To edit it, I used Fotor app, on a PC running Windows 8.1.

I modified the picture by playing with the tint, hue, temperature and exposure, trying to get it as blue as I could.

 

So to remember the other 2 versions and also to show the original, you can can check in this gallery.

Original
Red (week 2)
White (week 3)
Blue (week 4)

Let me know which one you like the best:

One Four Challenge – (Red) White (and Blue)

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I’m back with a new post for the One Four Challenge, by Captivate Me.

This is the 3rd week of the month, but my 2nd post, since I missed the first one.

The picture and the theme are the same as last week: red, white and blue on a picture taken on the 4th of July, while waiting for the sun to set and the fireworks to start.

Last week I used red, so today it’s time for White.

White

 

The picture was taken with a MotoX phone, running Android KitKat.
To edit it, I used Fotor app, on a PC running Windows 8.1.

I modified the picture by playing with the tint, hue, temperature and exposure, trying to get it as white as I could, while still able to see the entire scene.