Using Photoshop To Edit Your Pictures

I like to use Photoshop to improve my pictures. If you edit it too much, it looks phony, so I use it mainly to adjust exposure and sharpness. Below are three pictures that I "Photoshopped".

This Barred Owl was photographed at dusk. Later I darkened the picture and added the moon.

 This Prothonotary warbler was photographed on the shore of the mississippi river in Wisconsin.

All I did here was adjust the exposure and sharpness.

I have a special window I made in our family room that has an opening that allows me to stick

the lens outside to take pictures of birds in our backyard. I used a sun shade on the lens to

protect it from the sleet and snow that was falling one day last winter. The finished picture

only had a few blurred sleet lines so I used Photoshop "layers" and added a few more lines.

Next is an example of major editing.

I showed this picture on an earlier blog. Did you believe it was true picture or a manipulated one?

All the birds in the picture are real. It's just that they weren't all there at the same time. The three House Finches on the top right were on the branch. The last finch on the right was copied, flipped,

and then pasted on the top left . The Indigo Bunting was photographed on the ground. I removed the background and then copied the bird and pasted it on the branch. Before I did this I copied the branch that extends over the bird.  Once the bird was in place I pasted the branch back over the Indigo Bunting. The Goldfinch was cut out of another picture and pasted in front of the other layers.When I was teaching I use to tell  my students that you really can't trust a picture to be real  anymore,so don't believe everything you see.