It was during the height of Covid’s forced isolation when I felt compelled to help reestablish Marsh Creek’s withered community links, leading to the creation of the Spoonbill Courier.

One of the necessary tools needed to make “Spoonbill” a success was Adobe Photoshop, or Ps in the lingo of its logo. If you love photography, tools like Ps and Adobe Lightroom can bring out the best of your pictures. Ps also helped create the graphics and titles your see on many Spoonbill postings. Learning Ps was an uphill struggle, but enjoyable, creative, and worth it.

Which brings me to a recent photo a friend sent me. Nicknamed The Original, the scene was a sunset in the Moroccan Sahara. She was understandably proud of it: a nice setting sun lighting a desert landscape.

But …

Two things bother me about the shot. One was the presence of her friend, whom you see literally stopped in her tracks, pointing at something off in the distance. I felt her friend marred the image. If she wasn’t there, those footprints wandering off down across the dunes would be wonderfully evocative. And it also wouldn’t hurt, I thought, to maybe see more of the natural sky instead of a horizon wash-out.

So, the original is right below. Then my two corrective stabs further down below.

The Original

My first task was to try and erase the friend from the scene. Now, this is a commonplace task for the pros, but for someone still earning a Ps “degree”, it was an unexplored challenge. Trying a couple of the program’s corrective options, “erase” and “clone”, I went to school with trial and error. And as I progressed, in this case I learned “clone” is better than “erase”, provided you carefully clone parts of the image with similar lighting properties to the one you are removing. Specifically, I cloned the sands closest to her friend and applied the “clone” to erase her friend in brush strokes mimicking the natural lateral drift of the sands.

So, the friend is now removed from the scene (see below).

I next tackled the all white horizon that bugged me on the original. Another Ps tool, Sky Replacement, makes that task even easier, its algorithms offering up the option of a natural looking sky the naked eye would likely have seen from the sands. The app simply reduced the brightness that had overwhelmed my friend’s camera, returning the sky it to what the natural sunset would have looked like. I could have done this one manually, but hey, the result would have been the same. Maybe.

So, the First Edit (below) looks better, but artistically, fell short of its potential.

First Edit

Feeling that the setting sun, like the friend, distracted the viewer, I cropped it out altogether. Didn’t need it, because the real beauty lay in the desert sands. The image then became a focus solely on those footprints trailing off into the darkening dunes ahead. Better!

Next, I adjusted the lighting to add some vibrancy and late afternoon warmth to the sands to complete the transformation.

Those two additional improvements led the image below, the evocative scene of loneliness (?), isolation (?) that was buried in there and just needed to be released. And a question: “Who made those footprints?”

Second Edit

A fun hobby, thanks to Covid….