While I do believe that some shots are worth saving if they captured a unique priceless moment, I agree that this method is probably not one I would use to correct my overexposed photos. One technique I have used in the past is to apply both a cutout effect and poster edges in order to give the image a cartoony look. One could argue that this is a fairly cliche effect as well but I guess it just depends on your audience.

At any rate, I think a better candidate for rescuing a trash photo would have been a photo with too much grain and turning it b/w. That has saved some of my photos. Sometimes about grain in BW can be pleasing where it’s just annoying in colour.

I have done some wonderful things with my crap photos. These can happen for many reasons. Right place right time wrong camera comes to mind often. I have taken some photos of BB King in a dark environment with my point and shoot and got some great composures but crappy exposures and some out of focus shots. I tweaked them the best I could using my photo software then brought them into painshop. I converted them to black and white and tweaked the white balance to make them look like some very old club photographs. I love them, some people do see them and think they are out of focus but others see the art for what they are art. I also took of of Lucile and tweaked it in color and used some “painting conversion” software and slightly converted it to look more like a piece of art. And it looks great even those that do not like the B&W BB shots because they feel they are a tad out of focus they love that shot. And the original is out of focus as well.

So you can turn crap into art.

Now my personal opinion of the image above is that it certainly is over exposed and I think that hurts it in this warholesk conversion. The bright areas in the color squares are equal in color to the background I think perhaps if this were adjusted and the original white background were changed to be slightly darker than the face area that this would take on a whole new look and would be much more appealing. The face area and the background area having the same balance hurts the image visually. Or maybe even if they were both balanced the same but started out darker in the first place; either way it would bring the final image to a whole new place. Yes it is white because of overexposure but perhaps just adjusting the color white some then make the other boxes. (I hope that makes sense?)

Nonetheless, DPS tries to be loyal and responsive to its readers and to what they want. We tried to present something a little different. The fact that it didn’t resonate with readers is neither good nor bad. It’s simply useful feedback that will be taken and used to make DPS an even better place for serving the interests of the photographer community in the future.