Having watched Real Madrid’s 5-0 drubbing of Xerez a week earlier, I didn’t have high hopes for Tenerife last Saturday. Yet despite an eight-year absence from the Primera División, Tenerife will have hoped to cause an upset, and not for the first time. In the mid-90s they denied Real the title, gifting it to bitter rivals Barcelona, by beating them on the last day of the season. Twice! But Real continued their 100% start to the season and, although they took longer to break the deadlock (they had scored within 90 seconds in their previous two matches, both goals thanks to individual efforts by Ronaldo), they comfortably saw off the visitors 3-0. The win moved them to the top of “La Liga” on goal difference.
2 comments:
It must be really useful having an automatic colour filter on your camera so that you don't have to use any skill to post a picture like that.
I used two principal methods to create the colour accent effect in this photo. The first was indeed to use the colour accent feature on my camera. I filled the viewfinder with Jaime’s pink shirt and set the camera to isolate that particular colour. Then I stepped back and took the shot, the result being a black and white image except where the camera has detected the right shade of pink. As you suggest, I could have stopped here because the result really is impressive.
However, Jaime’s shirt was not the only pink in the shot: the bwin logo, Raul’s face on the LCD and some members of the crowd were also showing up. I remove this with the second method, the traditional way of selectively colouring a digital photo. But first, some general touching up in GIMP: I tried to correct the overexposure, I straightened and cropped and I rubbed out some birds flying over the stadium. Then I created a copy of the image and layered the two duplicates on top of each other. There are many different ways to layer, and in this instance I used the ‘burn’ setting to make the pink as vivid as possible without looking too garish.
Now for the colour accent. I created another duplicate of the image, but converted it into pure black and white. I layer this on top of the colour image using the ‘normal’ setting, which completely obscures the colour layer. Next I added a mask to the black and white layer, which allows me to manipulate the opacity of the layer. I zoomed right in to Jaime’s shirt and 'rubbed out' the areas of the black and white image in order to reveal the colour layer underneath.
Of course, by using layers and masks I remove the need to use my camera’s colour accent function at all. But the use of one or both the techniques gives rise to subtle differences in the final images. For example, Jaime’s shirt loses its colour towards the bottom of the picture because my camera did not identify the right shade of pink (it was probably in shadow). I liked this effect, which would have been lost if I’d used the masking technique on a full colour image from the start.
PS As I mentioned, I use GIMP to edit my photos, which is as powerful as Photoshop and completely free. It can take a bit of getting used to, but there are tutorials galore online. There’s not a photo on this blog that I haven’t had to doctor in one way or another, which says a lot about my photography skills.
PPS Be careful when Googling "GIMP".
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