I don’t normally participate in art competitions since my artistic skills are not exactly outstanding. Most of my competition occurs on the basketball court. But this morning I had to diverge myself from programming for a while to let my brain cool off when I read on the Corel Newsgroups about a photo editing competition. Only because I needed to extend my break did I follow the link to a site called SitePoint.com. The site is for web developers… so I decided to give the competition a go.

I doubt I followed the directions too well as the competition guidelines call for coloring a black and white photo and removing the graininess. While I removed some graininess, I did not "remove all” as I found that it simply did not look very realistic when too smooth. (This could simply mean I am not that good after all…)

Why I was so worried about graininess when I superimposed a giant tadpole into the photo is something philosophers can debate for years to come… but for the moment here is my submission. I edited and composited the image in Corel PHOTO-PAINT X3.

Full-Sized samples are linked below. Tools in Photo-Paint used were Tone Curve, Image Adjust, Color Hue, Color Tone, Blend, Transparency Brush, Masks and multiple layers.

• Colored Photo
• Colored Photo with Edits

Images inserted include a Tadople Photo, Arizona Mountains and clouds from a sunset in Ohio.