Day 128: The Subtlety Of Roadworks

Yes, indeed, I am being ironic. I had to go shopping today and I really hate shopping. Sometimes it's ok but only rarely and never when I actually really need to go get something. So I usually get fed up and irritable and generally regress to the "can we gooooooooooooo yet!" stage after very little time has passed. I had no interest in hanging round the town once I was finished so I just jumped on a bus and figured I'd sort out a picture later. However, I decided to try some from the window of the bus, just out of interest. You see tourists doing it a lot in the middle of town so what do they see? Not a lot from what I can gather - or nothing good anyway. The roadworks on the way out of town did catch my eye though. I wasn't entirely sure why and it was just a pretty boring shot when viewed on the laptop until I realised it was probably all the bright colours.

I decided to try out a technique called colour splash which I have seen a friend using in some of her pictures. I was expecting it to be all complicated and difficult but if you can work layers it's pretty easy. Essentially you create a greyscale layer and then use the paint brush to paint holes through to the true colour image below. People who know me will probably be saying at this point "but she hates image processing!". This is very true but I hate it where you're trying to make a crap photo better by altering things you should have done in the field or things that were not possible and passing it off as if it was straight off the camera and you are that good. I know I'm not that good and I would hate for people to think I'm better than I am purely on how good the software I ran it through is. This is very obviously altered and it is still the original image - I don't mind that. The whole point of this blog was to help me learn more about photography - today I had a boring photo, but I used it to learn an image processing technique and I think it went well! :-)