Photoshop

Winding Road

Computer software for image manipulation and alteration

Photoshop is the name of a computer software program that is widely regarded as the industry standard. It is used extensively to manipulate images but also to create new compositions and layout multi-image web-pages, brochures, etc. Next to correcting colour casts and sharpening digital photo's, I occasionally use Photoshop to alter photographs into posterized images.

Sehnsucht nach die Nostalgie. Early 20th Century railway posters have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. The beautiful designs for the Great North Eastern Railway Line or those by Cassandre for the European Railways.

Using a Mac and Photoshop, I created a similar style of image from a digital photograph of St Mary's Loch. In Germany as well as Scotland, the landscape is offering ample opportunity for this technique.

The Sound of Red. I was visiting the Bettich Klavier Werke to collect some photographs - that had been left after an exhibition - when Matthias Bettich showed me his latest product, a limited edition of one of his upright piano's in a stunning red laquer finish.

I could not resist getting my camera and even though the light was all that spectacular, the piano was. It did not seem to mind me staring at it, so I took a few photographs and decided that the colour was comfortable in the surroundings of some Italian words.

Turning a photograph into a poster-like image. The first picture in this series illustrates the transformation. Move your mouse over the picture of the Waldmark Road, and the picture changes from the original photogrpah to the posterized (many shades of colour are reduced to large areas of only one dominant colour) image.

The four pictures in this collection are Photoshop renderings of some photographs I took in May 2005. This is the road to the village where we go for fresh rolls. It is my favourite road in the area.

Jim Mitchell, our neighbour in Scotland from the other side of Brigg End Hill, wanted to advertise the environment in which he and his family have bred and reared sheep for almost two centuries.

The outing was a glorious afternoon, with a Nikon and the deep, deep silence of many miles of empty hills. Well, there were some sheep but even they kept silent.

There was so much beauty in Scotland, that we decided to start using pictures of the scenery around us for our Christmas and New Year's Greetings.

At first we had a traditional postcard printed by an Edinburgh printing house featuring a slide of the hills surrounding the loch in snow-white Winter. Later on we switched to entirely digital cards. This one was made from a photograph taken from the study at Rodono.