Post processing fun

I've posted before about tweaking my photos in what's called "post-processing", when you use a software program like Adobe's well known Photoshop (or in my case, cheaper versions of software that does a similar job). I pointed out in that post that I always thought of it as cheating a bit, but the more I've started to play with this, the more fun I've had. Firstly, you can make fairly mediocre "out of the camera" or OOC photos look much better with a bit of contrast or colour tweaking here and there or a subtle (or not so subtle) crop. But there's also the fun element. In the original post I'd superimposed several images of me in my garden into one shot, looking like I had multiple doppelgängers - scary I know.

Today I've been experimenting with some photos I took of Barry Island's arcades a few months ago.. The original shots were taken on a fairly dull day in February, and looked like this:

These are ok-ish in the greater scheme of things, perhaps as a record of building on Barry Island at the time, but they're hardly stand out, and one it clearly out of focus slightly. Given the generally brash nature of arcades with their flashing lights and bright colours, I thought I'd accentuate all that but winding up the saturation in my software to 100%, and then collating the photos into one image. The result is this:

It's certainly not subtle, but I rather like the way it's turned out and would argue that I've managed to turn some frankly pretty ordinary photos into a piece of art. I acknowledge this sort of thing isn't to everyone's taste, but it was fun fiddling about with this. I might try it some more!