Surgery on a photograph of a rainbow

Interesting ideas that might motivate you to explore photograph edition tools that you have at hand in your laptop.

The photograph came out quite nice, I think. But not so much for the rainbow as for the lake and the mountains. So I experimented with simple operations on it trying to get some more interesting results focusing on the rainbow.

The operations consisted in color adjustments, cropping / mirroring / composition, all available in common software packages, enhancements with a free online tool called BigJPG, and a mix of everything at the same time.

It was fun and quite an artistic process, I would say.

As the caption of the lead photo states, while working on this story I felt for moments that I was inside the distorted realities that Marvel’s Dr. Strange utilizes to trick his opponents!

So this is the photograph, original on the left and adjusted by contrast, brightness and color saturation on the right. All done with commands of the picture tools menu in PowerPoint — and many other (free) programs can do this too.

I shot this photograph at the shore of Lac Leman in the frontier between Switzerland and France (the mountains on the other side of the lake are in France). There was a very nice arc of rainbow falling down from the clouds into the water:

You can see a quite nitid rainbow, especially in the regions where the background is darker.

By zooming on the enhanced image and improving it with BigJPG’s artificial intelligence filter, we can better appreciate the rainbow:

Mirroring an image to create a scene and place that don’t exist in reality

Back to the starting, pristine shot, I duplicated it, flipped one, and merged both side by side:

Copy, flip, and extend

Similar operations as above, but playing more with the exact cuts.

Like this:

And then this:

Until I converged into this:

which I like because it reminds me of the kind of photographs you can take in large salt flats.

Finally, a composition to reconstruct a full rainbow

As in the lead photo.

Here I first arranged multiple copies of the photograph…

…and then corrected brightness, contrast, and color saturation until I liked it the best:

I hope this story motivated you to play with your photographs trying to enhance details, highlight colors or shapes, etc. Of course shooting a photograph properly is of utmost importance, but I hope you have appreciated in this story that edition can also improve photographs, and add to the artistic part of it all.

www.lucianoabriata.com I write and photoshoot about everything that lies in my broad sphere of interests: nature, science, technology, programming, etc. Become a Medium member to access all its stories (affiliate links of the platform for which I get small revenues without cost to you) and subscribe to get my new stories by email. To consult about small jobs check my services page here. You can contact me here.