Friday, January 29, 2010

Icy waterfall

One of my favorite nature spots in this area is Chapel Falls, a series of small cascading waterfalls outside of Williamsburg, MA. It's a beautiful spot at all times of the year, but definitely takes on a kind of eerie, severe beauty in the winter, when the cold temperatures render the rushing waters into weird and wild ice forms.

I took some photos of the falls last January, and just ran across them this week. Here's a view of the largest of the falls, put together from two photos (with the help of PanoramaMaker, of course!).



I wanted to try to eliminate the overly blue cast to this other photo of the falls…



… so I opened it in Photoshop and ran one of my favorite quick "Adjustments" on it, "Auto Levels" (Command-Shift-L). I've had good luck with this in the past, but in this case it produced a somewhat bizarre and unexpected effect, as you can see here.



The "bloody falls" effect is creepy… but also kind of cool. I have no idea WHY it happened when I made that adjustment. -- PL

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hahha i love playing with those effects in photoshop. i do that everyday at work for production, and that blood effect always gets me lol. its awesome!!

by the way i got my fugitoid figure today at work and its great!! thanks for making it available!!!! you the man!!!!

mikeandraph87 said...

Photoshop is an amazing toy! Awesome set!

Got my fugi-relic. Looking forward to its arrival! :D

Anonymous said...

If I had to guess, Auto Levels essentially determines the bright and dark points of the photograph, and tries to match the image to a technically pleasing range of tones. It brightened the white ice and snow to a more proper white, which I would guess caused the dark areas to brighten to reveal detail, which was not present. Thus, the black areas become not so black, and you gained noise and that red tone. I'm sure many can get much more technical than that ... but maybe that shed a little light on it? Still, a neat/eerie effect!