By David Gewirtz
A few weeks ago, we ran an article in Connected Photographer that reviewed the weird, little Lensbaby lens attachment for SLR cameras. In that review, I used a sample image, shown in Figure A, to showcase how the Lensbaby transformed the image into something more surrealistic.
FIGURE A
It's not quite a blue bayou. Instead, we're in Florida. (click for larger image)
A bunch of you wrote in asking about the blue effect on the image. Typical of the letters received, Vibol Sorin wrote in, asking "I like the blue effect, but how do you get from RAW to blue?"
The answer is amazingly simple. The original scene, taken through the Lensbaby, looks much like Figure B.
FIGURE B
Here's what the Lensbaby actually saw. (click for larger image)
Because I saved the image in RAW format, when opening it in my photo editor (Photoshop, in this case), I needed to convert RAW to a format more easily edited. When you open a RAW image, you get a dialog box similar to that of Figure C.
FIGURE C
Photoshop presents a RAW import dialog. (click for larger image)
Look at the right side of the dialog. As in most things Photoshop, you'll notice a selection of options, menus, and sliders. Normally, when you're opening something in camera RAW, you want to use the options in this dialog to get the very best image quality you can. However, you can also use these options to distort the coloring of the image in various ways.
One of my favorite artistic tricks is to simply tinker with the settings to see what I'll get. For the photo in question, I just changed the White Balance from As Shot to Tungsten. I liked the blue look, and so I imported the image using the Tungsten setting, as shown in Figure D.
FIGURE D
A tweak here, a tweak there, and pretty soon, you have art. (click for larger image)
What I was really doing was telling Photoshop that I had taken the picture under tungsten light, when, in fact, I'd taken the image outside, at dusk. Because Photoshop was color correcting for a light wavelength that I hadn't actually used, the correction, instead, introduced a color distortion, the blue.
In effect, I tricked Photoshop and got something cool as a result. Don't be afraid to experiment. When you do, sometimes you'll get some very cool results.