Uma and DI asked me for some technical explanations for the Ganesha’s pic I put up.. this is me gladly picking up the opportunity to show off my half-baked knowledge :D. In this post, I would like to explain the settings and post-processing I did for that shot.
We have been taught to begin every shubh kaam taking God’s blessing, and my new obsession is really important to me. So after I got the Canon XS, I had to take a pic of Ganesha. I found this really pretty idol in my house and decided to experiment with it. It was already quite late in the evening, so there was no natural light, hence the shot had to be taken indoors. Thankfully my bedroom has two lovely sources of white light, hence it was quite well-lit for the shot. I also wanted the background to be blurred, since it would just distract the viewers eyes from the subject of the picture, so I kept the aperture wide open. I positioned the camera quite low.. almost on the level of the idol. Here is the original pic.
I obviously needed to crop the image, as the idol was quite small and there were a lot of other distractions. After the crop, I realised that the statue was a little tilted and needed correction, so I performed a bit of rotation to fix it. Since image looked a little dull, I played with the colours a little bit, using the levels tool to make the idol pop out a little bit. All the post processing was performed using the free tool Gimp, and reading some of the lovely tutorials present online. I did not want to go over board with the post-processing and the image looked just right, so that was it. I created a transparent signature at the bottom using this tutorial. Here is the final result.
Do let me know if you found this helpful (or boring 😉 ). If you want to experiment with the original image, and try your hand at post processing it, please do and leave a link in the comments section!
this is awesome Piyu !
Thanks for the link for post processing…
I love your blog 🙂
Gee.. Thanks Nu 😀 😀
Hugs!
Lovely !!! Piyu, this is damn gud…keep the pics coming… 🙂 Show us your talent behind the lens too… 🙂
Aww.. you guys are making my Tuesday! BTW, thanks a lot for asking me to write this on Uma 🙂
You are really good at it, Piyu! I am so glad you bought that camera first.. I have my one stop tutorial ready now! Yayyy!
And I especially love the name of this blog and all the pics.
Glad to be of help 😀 😀 Ping me whenever 🙂
Thank you for all the generous praise.. I am gonna cry now ;).. khushi ke aansu.. my baby is making me proud already 😀
Ah! your cool pictures made me wanna click and edit a picture right away 🙂
Keep ’em coming girl 🙂
You should try your hand at gimp for your existing fav pics. It can be really fun.
Thank you for the encouragement CB 😀
Awesome..Thanks for the details. May be one day, when I get a dslr, I wil use all these tips 🙂
You are most welcome 🙂 Even if you don’t have a dslr, you can try post-processing tools on your P & S shots.. Give it a try, you will be pleasantly surprised.