Engagement Ink: LITTLE COLOR CHANGES TO A PICTURE COULD GIVE DIFFERENT READINGS

For those who are familiar with biology, I am sure you must have heard of a blight. It is a disease that ravages plants, caused by bacteria, fungi or viruses and discolors the parts of the plant such that they appear brownish or slightly so.

When I took a look at this picture, of the parts of a leaf, I wondered if I could make a blighted image of it.

The original photo

Although the leaves looked fresh, but at some edges they looked worn out. So I took out my photo editing software, open source mind you, and called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and tried my hands at blighting the image above.

Since I wanted to change only one color, the yellow colors on the green leaf, I decided the hue-saturation tool was good for the job. I reduced the hue of the photo to -30 until I got one of the primary colors I wanted, something brownish. I then chose that as my primary color. I then increased the darkness of the photo by reducing the lightness to -30 and the saturation to 70. You can see the result below.

The blighted leaves photo

How powerful photo editing is.

On a wishful note, I wanted to convert the photo to the parts of a leaf that were fresh, green and somewhat tender.

Back to the hue-saturation tool again. This time, the primary color was not specific but just the master. I wanted the greenness to be outstanding, so I increased the hue to 20 and increased the lightness to 27. The photo shone brilliantly like green parts of a leaf in spring. It looked so fresh that one could almost touch them. If I wanted the green leaves to appear old and not fresh, I would have darkened it a little with the lightness feature, especially at the edges. On a last note, I decided to reduce the intensity of the color by reducing the saturation by 5, that is, -5.

The result can be seen below.