DreamScape

Forests can sometimes have a dreamlike quality to them, but what if you could make one more dreamlike?

Sometimes walking in a forest can feel like this-

Even if in reality the forest looks like this-

Feeling as if you have stumbled into a fantastical world is part of the joy of walking through the woods. They have a habit of shifting and never looking the same twice. The edits I made to the original photo show how magical and mysterious the woods can seem and may help people recall how wondrous it can be to trek through the woods.

For my first assignment from the assignment bank, I chose Switch up the Mood. I selected it because it is enjoyable to play around with photos and see what you can do with them. Still, I have never really sat down and played with all the various ways my phone allowed me to edit photos. For example, until this assignment, I had never changed the noise reduction or the black point on one of my photos. In the future, I hope to explore photo editing even more.

I started with the second picture featured above. It’s of the forested area you pass going on one of the little bridges at UMW. I already thought it looked rather pretty and whimsical, but I figured I could make it more so. To edit the image, I used the editing software that comes with the photo app that is pre-downloaded on my iPhone. Then I used the Dramatic Cool filter. I lowered the exposure, brilliance, contrast, warmth, and tint while raising the highlights, shadows, brightness, black point, saturation, vibrance, noise reduction, and vignette. I thought the edits I did gave the woods a much more dreamlike quality since there was more color and the edges were more blurred. I also thought the blurred edges made it look more like it could be something out of a painting, relating it back to our class theme, The Joy of Painting.