Photo Evolution, King St., Charleston

So if you didn't know, I don't own a nice Digital SLR camera (yet), so a bit of post editing goes into making my photos stand out. I would like to share how each stage works out with this lovely photo from Charleston of this young lady rocking her Barbour jacket, which seemed to be the coat of the season down there because I saw them everywhere!

First, I get home and take a look at each photo I'm going to use. They look something like this. A bit gray you would say.

After this, I load the photo into GIMP and start working. A bit of color level here, contrast there, a bit of airbrushing when needed so people aren't embarrassed that the zit that they woke up with is now on the internet being seen by who knows how many strangers (remember granny panties from Zack and Miri makes a Porno?). Yeah, not going to have people made fun of on my account. Anyways, next step is the color final, or what I call the "standard" file.

 

Much better! Bricks look red, coat looks green, shoes look gold, skin tone looks nice and tan and not all vamp'y. Most of the time I go one more step to make my photos stand out a little bit more. I add some blur to the background, which looks like this.

Voila! A little blur makes a world of difference. Carefully placed, most of the time unless you look very closely, you can't even tell I added it and it just looks like a natural depth of field produced by the camera. Unfortunately adding blur to my photos (especially when I come back from a trip and have 20 or more photos to edit) is a bit time consuming. Turning what should be about a 5 minute per photo process turns into a 10-20 minute endeavor. So for the most part adding blur is no longer a priority unless I think it's the only way the photo will make sense. I'm planning to have a new SLR camera with a 50mm prime lens by the end of this summer, so I want the obvious upgrade in photo quality to happen.

So there you go! A little bit of Street Style Photography Magic!