Before & After #185

This game is to help those of us who are trying to learn new tricks when it comes to editing.

Here's the breakdown of the game. I will post a picture that I choose, resized to exactly 1024 pixels maximum on the long side. Outside of being resized it has to be unedited...meaning no adjustments to any levels, it has to look like it did as it came out of the camera. As an option, a high resolution file may be made available for editing as LINK ONLY, and your final submission to the contest may not exceed 1024 pixels on the long side.

The game will last 72hrs and whoever can produce the best edited image (as judged by me) will be picked and it'll be their turn to post their unedited picture for all of us to take a crack at.

The participants must have their "Image Editing OK" turned on and they must provide at least a simple breakdown of how they edited the image, some entrants are a little vague on this point, please give us all details so we can learn and share tips. For instance if you use the unsharp mask tool or Smart Sharpen, provide us with the adjustments you used so others can try them out.

You can post multiple images, but the first image you post will be the one that is judged - all other images will be considered for knowledge and tip use only.

Also, please keep all comments, be they positive or negative, to yourself until after the game has ended.

If you happen to be the winner of the game please start the next one with the title of the game and the following number. For example…the next game should read "Before & After #186".

This is all about having fun so have at it!!!
This round will end Sat May 16th 5:00pm EST

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LR2 - crop & straighten, 5 Graduated filters, vignette
CS2 - Levels, Contrast, Color, Channel Mixer, Brightness/Contrast, Gamma -, Exposure +, Burn,
Clone out police truck, resize, 2nd layer, clone out tree, New layer/ 2nd photo close up of capitol building statue / lighter opacity view

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LR2: Temperature, Brightness, Vignet.
PS: added noise, added dust and speckles, selective coloring green

Hi everyone -- first time "playing." Learning a lot on this board, but mostly having fun.

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Had a few minutes to play with this one.

I'm out of practice...but I think this is all I did to it:

Cropped.
Cloned out the posts in the lawn and the truck.
Converted to black and white.
Made the sky all white.
Played with levels and contrast until I got it where I wanted it.
Sharpened (too much, now that I see it on here).
Added border.

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PTlens, barrel distortion, vertical change +10, rotate
Curves black, mid, white
Gradient top to 1/3 bottom pic
Clone out fence and car.
Added contrast
Lab mode -> Convert to B&W
Duplicate layer - multiply
Another contrast adj.
3:2 crop

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cs4--cloned out car, fence posts...and barriers on the right..
LR2- adjusted wb, upped contras,vibrance,black​,clarity,green hue. Took down saturation,darks shadows.. crop straighten..

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Two layers in GIMP. Top layer I upped the highlights and downed the shadows. Second layer I did a gaussian blur of about 35. Mode on the top layer is set to difference.

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As always I like to challenge myself to do something new with Photoshop in these contests, so I thought it might be fun to try an animated gif this week (which turned out to be a LOT of work). First time I've ever tried it, and I learned a lot. The file sizes can get crazy big!

Tracey, I'm afraid there isn't much left of your original - just the building

• Copy the building - flip, paste - mirrored image (needed room for the top to flip).
  
• Created a fisheye effect.
  
• Cropped, sky removed.
  
• New sky added.
  
• Levels, Curves, saturation.
  
• Reduced Sky + Dome to 500 pix.
  
• Unsharp Mask
  
• Obama Added + Added Cigarette and sized (distored perspective)
  
• Liquified + Distorted
  
• 5 Flames added at .01 sec per frame.
  

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sorry for the quick post but I am making dinner lol.

Lore is the Winner I just loved how you added the top part to the background of the image.

Kendoway fantastic job on the animation (it would have been awesome if you were able to make the lighter open and close but I know that would have been alot of work too)

I had a extremely hard time picking the winner because everyone did a wonderful job on the image.

again sorry for the quick post.

Congratulations -- very neat affect with the dome!

Way to go Lore -- Great edit!

LOL@Chris! Very funny indeed.

Nice edits everybody.

Crisp salute to General Lore!

And props to my fellow contestants!

BTW, the Obama one is hysterical. And he does smoke.

Thanks for the kudos all, it was fun to make. I'm still getting used to CS3 (over 2, which had Image Ready), now it seems like it's built right into CS3. I initially did a really big 1024 pix version of it, that had the dome opening, the lighter lighting, and Obama popping in with a motion blur. The bloody thing weighed in 2.5 MEGS!

So then I had to go back and learn how to optimize animated gifs, which made my head hurt.