Faking it

With new advances in technology, it is getting harder and harder to tell a plain old photo compared one that was taken 'out in the real' world.
I prefer hiking to the ridge and enjoying what Mother Nature provides in the morning and not what I think it should be like.

Some new photo editing programs offer something called Skyswap. It is all over the place. You can find it on PicsArt and BeFunky to name a couple of on line photo editing apps.

ON1 offers it also. No, I am not paid to mention them. I just use the program because it is easy and fast.

I generally do NOT use it.
Here is a sample of the real shot and then the SkySwap added in.

Original photo.

SkySwapped.

Is it cheating? Oh yes, I think if I claimed the above shot as the original photo I couldn't live with myself. However I would love to see a sky like that with a foggy atmosphere. It is pretty rare to get so much color in our area with so much dense fog. 

But.
There is the Butt.

It makes my eyebrows go up when I see the comparison. It makes it prettier with more color.

But.

It is still cheating.

One more cheat.

Original.

Skyswapped.

Next I'll address the fun stuff. I wrote a series of books for my grandkids at one time regarding my dog Morris and his toys that were 'alive'. I always was looking for a way to make the photos in the books to look more like illustrations.

In order to do that, I had to delve into the wild world of radical edits. At the time I settled on making the photos a bit oversimplified and a bit more colorful. Here is one of Morris's toys having a discussion with one of our Dexter cows. 
The original photo had 3 lines of hot wires in it that I had to clone out. That was a very hard job to do.

In this era of editing fun, I depended quite a bit on the Topaz software. Their plugin with Simplify was what I used a lot for trying to make photos look more like colorful drawings.

That was so much fun!

So I've been playing with an idea of making a story with my little characters. For fun I decided to just pick something small and go for it.

For those who don't work with programs and edits, the below is a sample of how much more advanced masking and editing have become over the years.

I recall trying to extract one thing out of an image years ago. The process was lengthy and painstaking. More often than not it took me so much time and effort, that I'd have to save the work and then go back to it.

Sometimes it would even freeze up my computer.

Newer programs allow a person to indicate in red what they want to get rid of and use green to keep.

It works best with high contrast images.

I isolated the little figure and now it was part of the image below it. But it doesn't look too 'real' even if the world around the figure is 'unreal'.

I added some effects and changed the colors up a bit.

This was a fun exercise. 

See what happens when I am stuck inside? 

No worries. 

I did my chores first and froze about 3 lbs of green beans, washed windows, dealt with Charlie hair, made hubby lunch, and then caught the goat who got out of his pen and pulled some geraniums out of planters...

All in a rainy, moody, dreary, cloudy day.

I can't wait for the nicer weather we are supposed to have this week!

We have plenty of mud to go around and the yard is growing like crazy again. We could do with a week without rain.

Have a great Monday.