A Watchful Guardian

Friday, Friday,
Pants on Fire!!!

Or something like that. Another crazy work week comes to end. Thankfully. And tomorrow is my birthday, so double the happiness for the impending weekend. I just about have enough time and energy for another AfterBeforeFriday post. Hop over to Stacy’s blog Visual Venturing to check other people with too much free time on their hands (hope none of them will read this 😀 ).

The post-processing was a nightmare, I just couldn’t get what I wanted. First I ran it through the GIMP, removing the leash and balancing the colors. Yellow was a particular b#%”$, it was so hard getting the right yellow for the flowers, without turning the entire image into a yellow mess. I really didn’t like the results I was getting. Then I went out for a walk, returned and discarded all the work, starting from the beginning. Same steps led to slightly better result, but it was still a bland image. I was running through all the tools in GIMP faster than Usain Bolt.

I wanted to create the window with my Berta in the focus and everything else blurry. Finally, I ran the image through my good old friend PicMonkey (they should really pay me for the promotion) and played around, until I stumbled upon a solution. I sharpened the image almost to the maximum which gave me some improvement on the dog and the grass, but everything else was awful. Then I used “Focal Soften” which gave me the final result. Some will say – too much work, I say – you’re right. I had the right idea, but the execution was not going the way I wanted. The final image doesn’t have the quality I would like, but considering the original image was taken with the phone camera with me hiding in the bushes, it is what it is. Btw, I flipped the image just so it would look cool in Stacy’s post.