Ho, Ho, Ho!

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Not everyone who owns a copy of photoshop should use it…

…documented in detail at the Photoshop Disasters Blog.

The number of major corporations guilty of egregious image manipulation errors is surprising.

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Otherworldly Ants (part 2)

Acromyrmex versicolor – the desert leafcutter

Here’s the original:

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Otherworldly Ants (part 1)

If you’ve been paying attention to cinematography or photography the last few years, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed the popularity of a particular grainy, desaturated, slightly surrealistic style. This look was popularized in films like 300 and Saving Private Ryan, and has become commonplace in glamour photography and advertisements for everything from perfume to shoes.

Inexplicably, this high-fashion style has yet to penetrate the ever trendy world of Ant Photography. So last night I conducted some ground-breaking photoshop experimentation and created the above image. I’m pleased with the result: a Tetraponera that looks like it walked off the set of 300. I’ve pasted the original image below:

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Photo Technique: Post-Processing

Photos posted to myrmecos.net rarely go straight from the camera to the web. Through some combination of errors related to exposure and the innate properties of digital sensors, raw images can be a surprisingly poor match to what is seen through the viewfinder. Raw images are often relatively flat in appearance, with colors that are shifted or off-hue. For instance, Canon cameras by default impart a warm reddish hue to their files that is especially apparent in macrophotography. The nice thing about raw files, and indeed the main reason for using them, is that they are malleable enough to allow a wide latitude of corrections.

How much do I alter the raw images? You can see for yourself. Here I’ve posted a series of before/after comparisons (raw and uncropped above, processed below). Click on each to enlarge.

If an original image is within reasonable boundaries of exposure and composition, and it was taken using the camera’s raw settings (not jpeg!), they can be adjusted to more closely match what I remember seeing in the viewfinder. Below is an example.

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