Photo Transformation of Milky Way Cattle Moonlight

If you want to make it as a fine art photographer in today's world, you can't just take a photo and slap it up on your website anymore. Technology is changing, improving, and there are more artists to compete against. Photographers have to show their artistic side and provide something unique.

This requires editing every photo. It can be editing a photo just to enhance it and touch it up, editing it into mixed media art, or completely transforming it into a different photo. I'm going to start blogging to show a little bit of what I do to some of my photos to create art pieces.

I'll start with my Milky Way Cattle Moonlight image. This is somewhat a surreal type photo because in order to see and capture the milky way, you need to be in the right area and at the darkest spot possible in your area. Typically the moon is not bright and not in that area. You also have to be away from cities to avoid picking up light noise.

I had taken the three photos above. The first one is a capture of the beautiful Milky Way I took just east of Ozark Missouri near Sparta during the summer. The moon shot was taken on a beautiful clear night in Ozark, and the cow silhouette photo was also taken in Ozark at a cattle farm during a stormy spring day. They are all okay photos, but you want to ask yourself if you'd hang it on your wall before you decide to post them for sale. Each of these photos needed a little extra something to make them wall art material.

To start, I picked my photos and opened them in Lightroom. Individually, there wasn't much editing done to them other then a little color enhancement and sharpening. I did this so I could then save them as jpg files. I shoot all my photos in RAW format and I use a variety of programs to edit them. Knowing I was going to be using Gimp to mix the photos together, I had to process the RAW file before opening in Gimp because it currently doesn't have the capability of processing RAW files. However it's a great program! After converting and saving them, I opened them as layers in GIMP using the cattle photo as my main first photo.

Using a combination of brushes and filters, I was able to combine them into one image. I also had to do some color and tone adjustments to each layer so they look cohesive. Most of the adjustments were done with the moon color. To make it a little more natural looking (but still keeping a surreal look), I then reopened the combined image in Lightroom and made some more adjustments. I especially focused on adjusting the light around the moon. Placing the moon as it was, wasn't very realistic so I used a radial filter to add some "glow" around the moon so it looked like it was illuminating the sky around it. Then making a few other adjustments, the art piece was done. The three images look far better together then they did individually. To get a better look of the final edited photo, click the photo below or the cover photo above.