Happy Birthday to MJ and Fun with Photoshop

Our friend MJ in Yorkshire had a party last night to celebrate her birthday - no prizes for guessing which birthday was being celebrated! Anyway, the evening was excellent and when the time came to bring out Sarah's home baked delicious birthday cake (complete withe "Secret Strawberries"!), I thought I'd get the camera out and take a pop.

This is where things went wrong as I'm not an excellent photographer and its only a teeny tiny Sony camera and the lighting was all wrong and the cake was too white and everything else was too dark (how many more excuses can I find...). So the originial picture (see small photo on the right) needed a LOT of improvement. So having learned how to banish the blue seawater from my underwater pictures using photoshop, I decided to have a play with this photo of MJ and the cake...

First I improved the exposure and the gamma setting to lighten the picture and improve the contrast to get this result but as you can see, the close up of Conroy's face and nose and the fact that the 40 on the cake is back to front, does not make for the most convincing portrait.

In the end, I decided to crop the picture down, thus focusing on the birthday girl herself (and her mad friend K8 who is clearly has a cake fantasy!) and then to rotate the picture about a vertical axis to reveal the 40 in the candles the correct way round.

Having a tendency to fiddle with things a bit too much, I then thought that a special effect might make the photo even more interesting and this is where photoshop goes absolutely wild! There are dozens of Filters and Effects that produce mysterious results. In the end, and having tried plenty of them, I opted for one in the menu:

Filter -> Filter Gallery -> Stylize -> Glowing Edges

You can judge for yourself as this is the picture at the top of the blog.

But the lesson I've learned is that providing you've got the time, you can take the simplest photo and turn it into a work of art ready for exhibiting in the Tate!

The photos and possibly one or 2 more can be found in my Flickr account