Photographer: Michael Douglass
Title: Where the Wild Things Grew
Camera: Canon 400D with 18-55 lens
Comment: Sometimes it takes the slightest adjustment to make a good photo great. In this instance, I opened the image in Photoshop and after a moment made one simple little change. Can you guess what it was?
Go and get a couple of pieces of A4 paper and place them at the top and bottom of this image. Very slightly rotate the pages clockwise (around one degree will do). Can you see the image no longer looks like it’s falling away to the right? The same result can be achieved in Photoshop by rotating the image anti-clockwise one degree and then cropping out or cloning in the visible edges.
Why does such a subtle adjustment work so well? Imagine your eye as a steel ball rolling around this image. My eye is taken to the right side of the image and gets stuck there, simply because all the lines are flowing downhill to the right. By turning the image just a little to the left, we get those two white lines at the top and bottom of the photograph level and that keeps our eyes in the middle of the frame.
The only thing I would do now is darken the road at the bottom of the image and adjust the curves to improve the overall brightness of the image. I think this is a gorgeous urban landscape – well seen!
Michael Douglass' original image.
The Image Doctor's edited image.