Examples of image manipulation

Examples of white balance

What is white balance?
It all boils down to the concept of color temperature. Color temperature is a way of measuring the quality of a light source. It is based on the ratio of the amount of blue light to the amount of red light, and the green light is ignored. The unit for measuring this ratio is in degree Kelvin (K). A light with higher color temperature (i.e., larger Kelvin value) has "more" blue lights than a light with lower color temperature (i.e., smaller Kelvin value). Thus, a cooler (resp., warmer) light has a higher (resp., lower) color temperature.

The following table shows the color temperature of some light sources

Light Sources	Color Temperature in K
Clear Blue Sky	10,000 to 15,000
Overcast Sky	6,000 to 8,000
Noon Sun and Clear Sky	6,500
Sunlight Average	5,400 to 6,000
Electronic Flash	5,400 to 6,000
Household Lighting	2,500 to 3,000
200-watt Bulb	2,980
100-watt Bulb	2,900
75-watt Bulb	2,820
60-watt Bulb	2,800
40-watt Bulb	2,650
Candle Flame	1,200 to 1,500

Examples of Lighting - Hard and Soft Light

Uses of soft light

• Soft light use is popular in cinematography and film. 
• Cast shadow-less light
• Fill lighting. Soft light can reduce shadows without creating additional shadows.
• Make a subject appear more beautiful or youthful through making wrinkles less visible.
• Supplement the lighting from practicals. This technique is used to perform "motivated" lighting, where all light in the scene appears to come from practical light sources in the scene. Soft light does not cast shadows that would be a giveaway of a supplementary light source.

Hard light

Hard light sources cast shadows whose appearance of the shadow depends on the lighting instrument. For example, fresnel lights can be focused such that their shadows can be "cut" with crisp shadows. That is, the shadows produced will have 'harder' edges with less transition between illumination and shadow. The focused light will produce harder-edged shadows. Focusing a fresnel makes the rays of emitted light more parallel. The parallelism of these rays determines the quality of the shadows. For shadows with no transitional edge/gradient, a point light source is required.

The two images here show how diffusion of light happens differently. Basically, diffusion of light is a way of creating softer light so an image has less shadows.

 In the first image, the subject is stood outside in harsh light. There is no diffusion, hence the dark shadowing from the person. This is different in the second image; it was taken inside with a overhead light. This had a lampshade over it, which diffuses the light and makes very little shadow.

Here you can see the light changing.

 

Portrait Photography

Portrait photography is the capture by means of photography of the likeness of a person or a small group of people (a group portrait), in which the face and expression is focal point of the photo. The objective is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the subject.

Here are a few of my portrait photos, even though two are of a animal to me it still counts as portrait, as its all about capturing the emotion with in the photo.

Group Portraits

MACRO Photography

Macro Photography is close-up photography, usually of very small subjects. classically a macro photograph is one in which the subject on the negative is bigger than in life size. However in modern use it refers to a finished photograph of a subject as greater than life size.

Comparing macro with landscape, the main difference between them is that the aim of landscape is to show the bigger picture and to show lots of things. where as macro its of one main thing and showing all the detail of that.

MACRO

 Landscape

Here are some of the photos reversed - Bottom ones are original