I'm working on perfecting my green (or in this case yellow) eye correction on Shasta's photos, and I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.

I made this edit in GIMP. I used a brush size just slightly larger than Shasta's actual iris set to 35% opacity and a very dark brown-black.

I set the opacity low because I like to be able to control how dark I make the correction. With opacity set to a low number, I can click repeatedly until I get the effect I like for the particular photo I'm editing. Also, since I'm not completely obscuring the underlying photo, I can see exactly where to place the highlights. I chose a dark brown-black because, for this photo, using pure black looked "obviously edited."

To add the highlights, I selected a brush approximately the size of the original highlights, set to white and also with 35% opacity. Again, I clicked until I had the right effect.

Here's a side-by-side of the before and after.

I'm just glad I don't have a cat.

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Shasta was quite possibly the cutest puppy who's ever lived. I know...every dog owner says that, but I have evidence!


This is the photo that appeared in Shasta's newspaper ad. We agreed to meet the breeder, merely, as my husband said, "to look" at the puppy. Yeah, as if.

A couple from a day trip to Mt. Rainier National Park. It was the first week of July, but there was still plenty of snow. Sadly, dogs aren't allowed on the trails in our National Parks. I understand the reasoning, but it sucks all the fun out of visiting the parks.

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As surprising as this may seem, Shasta can sometimes be naughty, as shown in this photo where she has brazenly staked out a spot on Mommy and Daddy's bed.

This was my first attempt at fixing green eye. I chose a photo where the green was obvious, but not glowing like a Goa'uld.

Original on top, my edit below.

Original

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I went back to the drawing board in GIMP to try to improve my results on the moon photo I wrote about here and here is the result.

I used the same layers as in the previous post but this time, instead of adjusting the transparency of the entire top layer, I added an alpha channel, selected the black sky and made just the sky transparent.

If you look closely, there are still a few issues I need to work through, the main one being I need practice making accurate selections. I'm sure there's some kind of easy way to do this but I don't know what it is yet. As a result, the outer edge of my moon is kind of funky looking, but it's good to know I'm moving in the right direction. I think.

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Shasta is not what you would call a bold and independent dog. She loves to go to the dog park and play with the other dogs, but she likes to stay close to Mom and Dad at the same time. These two shots are typical...she runs ahead, then stops to check that we're still coming and waits for us to catch up. When I'm lagging behind, she'll even run part way back to check on me, before sprinting ahead of my husband again.

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We had some unusual March snow earlier this week. I love the snow and, sadly, we don't get all that much of it around here, so when we do, I tend to take a lot of photos. One thing that made this week's snow even more unusual is that it snowed all morning with temps hovering just over 32 degrees, then cleared up late in the afternoon. The setting sun combined with the melting snow set the many trees in my yard and neighborhood to glittering. I took many, many photos and only a few even come close to looking as amazing as it was in real life.

And a couple of my less successful shots. My main mistake here was trying to take the photos from too far away. I should have walked right out there instead of using my 55-300 mm lens, fully zoomed in, but - I'll be honest - the glittering, dripping trees were beautiful, but that didn't mean I wanted to, you know, walk under them.

I saw this blog post a few weeks ago about a zoom lens being a crutch. I need to acquire some better lenses and occasionally venture out without my crutch.

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Hah! Made you look!

Western Hemlock silhouetted against the moon.

The next two photographs are two different versions of the same shot. The top one was save as a jpeg by the camera. The bottom was converted to a jpeg from the camera's RAW format. It's interesting to note that for this shot, the RAW file produced a much darker image than the jpeg, but for this one, the RAW image is much lighter.

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