The Ohio Box
Since I keep procrastinating on the post I planned to write, tonight I decided to “pull a Pete.” I decided to take what some would consider to be a boring photo and see if I could make it into something interesting.
Not only do I take pictures of bottles, but also I take photographs of boxes. Somebody has to do these things, you know.
I looked through some of the box photos I took a month or so ago. I found one that looked like I could do something with it because it had an interesting dent (which ended up being largely covered up in the final image).
I converted it to black and white using a high contrast blue filter. That helped highlight the details. I used Pete’s new favorite tool, the Reduce Noise filter to tweak the image a bit. And, I converted the grayscale image to a duotone image using a second color to give the appearance of an older photograph, which also incidentally helped restore the natural box color, but in a way that it looks like an aged photo.
That made for a cool background. As you can see, the box had “OH” written on it and circled. That was for “Ohio,” obviously so marked for sorting and shipping purposes or whatever. I left that in the cropped image and it gave me an idea.
I dug through some of my camera phone photos I took a couple months ago of Ohio. I desaturated them a bit and applied a sepia filter to give them an aged look, as though they were a somewhat aged and faded color photograph. I added borders to make them look like old-time photos too.
Then, I added my copyright line, and gave it a background to make it look like it was on a torn piece of paper attached to the original image rather than just something added with Photoshop.
After that, I took a section of the box where the tape was and made it into a layer overlaying the photo to the side. I desaturated the layer and adjusted the opacity so that it appears the tape is going over the photo rather than the photo being pasted on top of it. I think this is the final touch that pulled the whole thing together.
That is really cool. I agree with the last point - the tape overlay makes it come alive. Dang, this is good work, I’ve got to step it up before I’m put out of business.
Thanks for the mention.
It is amazing what can be done with photos theses days. But what is more amazing that you took the time to take a picture of a box in the first place. Very interesting, yup ah ha very interesting.
I never saw anything like that before…
This came out pretty cool. Love the tape idea.