Greenery for your desktop

File under: photography, Wellington

Yesterday at work I had to come up with some desktop images to match a particular theme (rawa, which can roughly be translated as resources) and colour (green). So I grabbed my trusty phone and rushed out the door, took a few quick images and took them back to the office for some quick Photoshop magic. My phone camera has a fairly mediocre resolution (1.3 megapixels) and a very poor lens, but I've found that these are not necessarily any impediment to conveying mood.

Ferns: 136kB jpg

Even so, I was surprised at how well they scaled to 1280x1024 resolution (Blogger scales them down a bit, so the images linked to here a bit smaller than that). Colourisation and curve manipulation certainly helped, with a bit of judicious blurring or unsharp mask. I even managed to blow the ferns image up to an A3 poster, by using Photoshop's Smart Blur filter to give a posterised look thatavoided excess pixelisation.

Seabed: 89kB jpg

There's a special WellUrban prize for anyone who can identify the locations of these two photos (hint: they are both from the Lambton quarter).