"Lizard in the tropical aquarium."

This is a tryout from the new "fix my pic" group. Original photo by Fenja.





5 comments so far...

cosmonautirussi June 23, 2009, 05:55 PM
What I did:

First of all Fenja asked: "How to make a boring picture livelier?"

My first thoughts were that the lines in the image are not so bad. The photo is not an action shoot... And I guess that one may feel the movelessness of the lizzard while watching this pic. It is hard to fix it without changing some major things, I guess. Besides: Lizzards are attractive animals! - I imagined that the best would be to get a dramatic, dragon-like close-up view... at best with a small depth of field... But this is not alway possible - and the resolution of the image does not make it possible.

The main thing in the original image may be that the subject disappears a bit in it. With Gimp I used a dark frame to focus only on the lizzard.

I could have stopped here - but I continued with some creative work. - Driven by the words of Fenja "not boring"... So I copied the result and desatured all colors to grey - and then choose a sepia color for the layer. I choose the color for two reasons: First: A red tone gives an alarming feeling. Second: Red is the opposite color to green. I also tried to recieve more contrast to add interestingness... - The strong high lights now suggest sun and heat - as the colors do.

After this step I took the orignal colored layer, copied it and moved it on top, using the "color" option in the layer section. I also faded the colors around the lizzard to transparency with a layer mask. All in Gimp. - That's nearly the result now.

The plant at the border really suffered from my editings. I croped the image and added another black frame with focus on the middle - and a black border for the resullting image.


A minor thing is that I also turned the image -1° and sharpened it smooth.


I think that the possibilities of creativity are huge. I was driven by the words "not boring" - but the own personal taste leaves a lot of descisions and other possibilties here...

dhania June 23, 2009, 06:51 PM
good job, I like the crop - thanks for sharing your process, too
Fenja June 23, 2009, 07:17 PM
Thank you, Cosmonautirussi. This looks much more interesting, as the original. Amazing what you can do with Gimp. Fix My Pic is a clever Idea, Dania.
chakra June 25, 2009, 01:44 PM
It looks much interesting now.
helen birch June 26, 2009, 05:00 PM
liking that brown hue, bleached out desert like look - apt lizard habitat
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