Before and After or How I saved My Wife's RE Picture

[Phelon Profile]

Hello Everybody,

Have you ever taken an over-exposed picture and wondered how can I fix that? Normally, you would probably toss one like this example, but in this case my wife needed this picture fast for including in a home listing. It looked like it had possibilities, and time was of essence to go back and retake. So here is the original, and how I used SPE to fix it:

IMG_4103-Living-Room-from-deck_Resize.jpg (809.1 KiB) Viewed 6680 times

Then in Smart Photo Editor, I used a series of effects. 1. Fix Overexposed 2. Dark Foliage 3. Color Balance - add blue 4. Area Treatment F6 5. Added a tree branch as an overlay from LayerCake.com elements 6. Area Treatment - a second time to go over shading and color saturation, etc, here and there. That was it. Here's the final, and it saved the day.
Phelon

IMG_4103-Living-Room-from-deck_pe4_Resize.jpg (943.78 KiB) Viewed 6680 times

[andrewb2012 Profile]

Hi Phelon,

Fantastic job my dear friend - indeed you saved the day! Shows what can be done with SPE. Hope you are well. Hope to be more responsive now that a busy period in my life has passed and things are calmer.

Keep in touch!

Andrew

[Phelon Profile]

Hi Andrew,

My dear friend, thank you so much for your kind words. I'm glad you have more free time, and, of course, I see your many effects and tutorials. You are one-in-a-million with the number of creations. I did print out your pdf of effects with titles---6 pages; now that is a lot.

When I first started with SPE, there were about 150 pages of effects; now there's close to 500. SPE has and needs a very good search engine. Someone would ask me what effect I used, and I would say it's on Page 4, third one over, called "such-and-such". It went pretty fast for a search, and still does, even though are 3X as many effects. I keep thinking of what would help the search, and I guess the Categories are best. If there was only some way to see all your effects faster visually, and see all the other many effects, too. I don't know, I was just thinking that in-addition to what we have in pages, their would be programed an option to see smaller views of the pages of categories. I've got to go now. My ideas start to flow when I'm thinking, but I soon quit, because I realize someone is probably working 24/7 to keep improving SPE.

Talk to you later. You're doing a great job!
Warm regards, your friend,
Phelon

[eadams Profile]

You did a wonderful job on the house image!

[andrewb2012 Profile]

Thanks for your kind words Phelon, there have been quite a few comments about improving the search engine's capabilities - I agree that it would be great. However, I have no knowledge about that kind of thing so I don't know how easy it would be to implement such improvements. As always, I presume the development team have to prioritise, therefore, search engine improvements might no be given a high priority. We can only hope!

Cheers,

Andrew

[Phelon Profile]

Hi eadams,

Thank you, also, for your kind words. I enjoy that you have responded so many times, because that camaraderie is a picture of friendship that we all need. After donating a small amount of money to the developer, David, of FotoSketcher, his friendship has also won my heart. Please give that free program a try for painting several styles. He has a new version out today...

FotoSketcher 2.9 for Windows: http://www.fotosketcher.com/download-fotosketcher/

Keep showing your work often, as it shows lots of creativeness. There are lots of people here I would like to hear from, so you, too, keep in touch.

My best to you,

Phelon

[eadams Profile]

Hi Phelon,

I also enjoy reading the posts of other community members. I wish that more SPE users would participate.

I downloaded FotoSketcher and it's a very nice piece of software. When adjusting settings, the preview window is a little small to give me a good idea of what the overall effect will be, so finding the right settings is a bit time-consuming, but hey, the program is free. I do believe in making a donation to software authors if I find myself using their free software.

[andrewb2012 Profile]

Hi Phelon & eadams,

I agree - it would be lovely to have more SPE users participate in the forum. I too use FotoSketcher and have bought the creator a couple of 'coffees', just like the good man suggested. All kidding aside, I've been using FotoSketcher for many years now - I use it to create layer images to superimpose on other layers within many programs including SPE, but it is a great 'stand alone' program developed by a single person.

Have a great day!

Andrew