Posterize Your Cinemascope!

.

Okay, so reading a lot of UK based blogs, it seems we're all struggling to take decent photographs because of the grey murk we call our weather.

.
So now I'm going to let some of you into a little secret ....
.
There's a whizzy website called Picnik - I'm sure most of you have seen it popping up on flickr, but maybe you've never got round to having a play with it?
.
Here's a photograph I took the other day for my blog post about my bedroom.
.

.
It's okay I suppose, you can make out everything, but it's a bit gloomy and it would have looked great if I'd taken it on a nice, sunny day.
.
So here's what I've done with it in Picnik - I've increased the exposure and taken down the temperature :
.
.
Now I would say the above photo has pretty much true-to-life colours
(although it does kind of depend on your monitor of course)
.
Here is a picture of one of my PE bags, taken next to a window on a background of white card.
.
.
In the photo above it looks like I've used fluorescent, day-glo red felt and the card looks quite blue.
.
In the photo below, I've experimented with the saturation and exposure and now the card looks pretty close to white and the red is a much more natural and less scary colour.
.
.
Once you've familiarised yourself with all the buttons and gizmos, you can really play with your photos!
.
.

Here I've used The "Orton-Ish" feature and applied it to a photo I took in the summer of a peony in the garden.
.

.

On this one I've used one of my favourite features, "Cinemascope" - use with or without the letterbox effect
.

This is a photo I took of a Giant Allium plant - I've used the "Focal Soften" tool to make the plant in focus and the background soft.

Have fun with your photos!