Digital Lady Syd’s Rule No. 9: Get the Shot!

I took this beautiful little rose at Lowe’s with my inexpensive Kodak C1450 14-mp point-and-shoot camera and it turned out very nice! These little cameras really do a great job for those unexpected shots! Since most people have decent cameras on their phones (mine is still a 2 megapixel so I carry this camera), there really is no reason not to get the shot. It just may not be quite as sharp or colorful as your good camera, but at least you get the shot, the memory, and something you can work with in Photoshop. That is what I did with this rose – it was a little soft except where it was focused, but the colors were still beautiful and overall, not that bad an image.

One of the issues I had with this image is that it is a JPG and there was a lot of Chromatic Aberration in the image – I tried to remove it in Lightroom, but it still looked rather bad so I treated it with a soft texture treatment to blend in the petals where the bleeding was bad. Some noiseware was also applied. Two gorgeous textures were stacked from French Kiss Textures – Artiste Fantasie at 80% opacity and Artiste LaDanse set to 68% opacity and her Spatter Brushes were used over the rose. Following Dave Cross’s path tutorial from his Photoshop CS5 Finishing Touches for Photographers class at Kelby Training (but it is also in his really good Photoshop Finishing Touches book), I created a fancy edge around the flower. Dave’s book was published a while back, but most of the tutorials work fine in CS6.

So get the shot, even if you do not have your best equipment with you – it may be a great image anyway!…..Digital Lady Syd