Kacey’s Black and White Challenge Part 1

Whoot! Got to work a little on my photos tonight and here are the results of one photo. (I’ll post a couple more photos by tomorrow.)

As I was going through my old photo CDs, I came across this little donkey. Almost 4 years ago, I married my soul-mate and we went on a honeymoon to a quaint bed-n-breakfast in Huntsville, AL. This little donkey lived there along with a few donkey friends, a small herd of goats and a blind horse.

This photo was taken with a Kodak DX3900 Zoom point-and-shoot camera. I had not a clue about photography. Not that it would have mattered since the camera had no manual settings. You can click on any photo to go to the full size version on Flickr. So here is the original photo I was working with:

OK, but boring. I couldn’t leave it alone. It needed fixin’ but I had to learn a bit about working in GIMP first. (Yea, besides staying up so late traveling in time, I was also playing in GIMP all night. LOL)

Here are the steps I took to fix that little donkey.

1. Clone out the date time stamp.
2. Selected the background and blurred it with a gaussian blur.
3. Boost the donkey’s saturation color a bit.
4. Sharpened the eye a bit.
5. Did a Sharpen Smart Redux on the donkey.
6. Dodged and burned the donkey’s fur. I especially wanted to give him more depth in the shadowed areas as well as lighten the cute white fringe around his ears. I also put a little dodge highlight in his eye.
7. Created an overlay and set opacity at (I think it was, I’ll have to go back and double check) 60%.

Viola! Done!

I’m pleased. I’m sure a more experienced GIMP user would have done a better job but I’m happy for my first attempt at some advanced post-processing. :)

And now for my black-and-white conversion…

I used this website’s info as a guide, trying out different filter channel mixer combinations to see which I liked best. I choose the yellow monochrome filter in the end.

What do you think?

Thank you, Kacey, for the fun challenge!