Spring Beauty!

Hello everyone! Spring is finally here! Finally, some spring flowers have come up, and I have a collection of photos to share.

Is it just me or is there a ton of stuff being released in the photography world right now! I have a huge backlog of posts right now and everything is kind of hard to keep up with it. That is why, yet again, I have a second post coming out over on Medium! It is all about the new Google Photos video editor that has been teased since December! It came out on Monday for some users and is being released to more people very soon. If you are interested, be sure to check it out. 😊

Insta Photos:

This first photo was taken on my Pixel 4a and I put it up on Instagram earlier this week. The compression algorithm made the background blur look a bit odd. I find it intriguing how different social medias manage compression.

This next photo is another photo from Instagram. These flowers were hidden behind the flowers in the photo above. I am so glad that I found them because I really like these flowers.

Ultimate Photo Editor:

This next photo I decided to edit in an editor that I wrote about in last week’s post. Below I have a screenshot of the settings that I used.

I went to the next step and saw that some features were added since last week. Unlike the mobile devs who saw my blog post, I couldn’t send anything about the post to the Microsoft store devs because Microsoft doesn’t give you access to the developers emails. So I doubt that they could have seen my post… although they might have through pingbacks (no clue if devs can do that).

Either way, the most notable update to the editor was the addition of a jpg export option! Yay!

Anyways, here is the final export:

As you can see, I made the photo have a cooler look because before I thought it looked a bit too warm. I did a few other minor edits as well. 🙂

Quick note: as I was finishing up the blog post. The editor got yet another update.

Darktable Edit:

For this photo, I did some edits which you can see in the screenshot above… Darktable is kinda complicated, and I haven’t used it in months. I bumped up the contrast (like I always do) as well as the saturation.

I next went and did some distortion correction to the photo. (mostly out of curiosity) I selected a random Sony camera because Google Pixels use a sensor from Sony. When I did the corrections, it seemed to sharpen bits of the photo so I just kept it in. I reduced some noise and exported the photo. Well, I feel kind of dumb because I actually had no clue how to export the photo 😂. I just screenshotted it instead. (sorry if this blog post loads slowly!)

Gimp Edit:

Well after that unfortunate edit. I wanted to edit the last photo in a simpler editor. Well, I changed my mind and opened the final photo up into Gimp, which is complicated but after doing the edit, I decided that it is only a bit more complicated than Photoshop Elements (meaning not super complicated.) I’ve also used gimp a bit more so I thought that it would go better.

Anyways, I did all the color edits and then added an ND filter effect. From what I can tell, the effect adds some more details into the photo! Pretty cool!

Here is the final export: