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First Foray Into Photo Editing

      Recently, I made my first attempts at learning how to edit photos. This was a very interesting learning experience as I never realized how much effort it actually takes to edit a photo in a way that is presentable. In editing a photo, one first has to have a photo that would actually benefit from editing. Almost any photo can meet this criteria as humans are not perfect and there are many mistakes that could be made when taking the photo. Such as the lighting not being quite right or the angle of the photo being slightly different from what the photographer had intended. In my case, I had a number of photos that I wanted to edit for my Fundamentals of Digital Media class. These were taken of the downtown Toledo area as part of an Urban Landscape focus point. One photo that really caught my eye was of an empty street leading away from the middle of the downtown area. It caught my attention because the road was completely empty, despite it being in the middle of the afternoon when one would expect there to be much more activity, a very Lonely Street.
      This photo has a lot of potential for editing as I made several mistakes when I was taking the photo. I took it when I was walking across the street and did not wish to linger long. So in my haste, I took the photo on an angle that is slightly off center. This is something that can easily be corrected with photo editing software. For this, I utilized Pixlr, a free online photo editing platform. Fixing the angle was very easy, utilizing the free editing tool to move and rotate the photo and then cropping it so that it would be square. But I felt that there was more potential with this photo from an artistic standpoint. The empty street with older style buildings reminded me of old photos of town centers in small western towns.
      So I decided to try and make my photo of the Lonely Street look like a photo from a time era long passed. When thinking of older photos taken using film and the limited technology of the era, the first thing that comes to mind is the lighting. Many photos that are taken in this manner suffer from overexposure as the photographer might not adjust the camera's exposure correctly from shot to shot. To reflect this, I increased the brightness and contrast of the photo. This made the sun much brighter and more prominent in the sky above the buildings on the left side of the street. With older photographs, there is also the color limitations of the photos as these were limited by the technology and the age of the photos. Pixlr made this adaptation very easy as there is a old photo" adjustment in the application. This made the colors much more white washed. The only remaining adjustment that I felt the photo needed was a boarder, as many of the older photos, when developed, were not cut perfectly along the picture itself, leaving a boarder. Using the "inner glow" layer adjustment, I was able to mimic the boarders found around the photo type I wished to mimic. These adjustments came together very well to make this modern street seem like one from a time long forgotten.
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