All's Well That Ends Well!

Submitted By:  PARI    (Click On The Name To See The Profile)

How & Where It Was Captured:

Settings:

Ø  Shutter Speed: 1/10 sec

Ø  f/5

Ø  35mm

Ø  ISO:  500

I used two tools to edit this photo. One - GIMP and the second is Snapseed.

As you can see in the unedited photos, there is a woman intruding on my perfect shot! I don't usually edit my photos but this one was begging for an edit.

I started out with Snapseed; I tried to take out the intruding woman with the help of their repair tool. However, I wasn't impressed with the result. The reason being, there were two lines in the photo I had to take care of - One was the horizon and the other was the line where the sand on the beach meets the water. If I didn't get these two right, the photo wouldn't turn out great. May be it was not the problem with Snapseed; probably an expert user would have known how to do this effect. However, I didn't have the patience to learn as there was a tool I knew would get me the desired effect i.e. GIMP.

I love GIMP(https://www.gimp.org/) as it has many photo editing capabilities that Photoshop has without the heavy price tag. To make the perfect horizon line, I selected a square part of the photo to the right with the horizon line it. I also included part of the sky and the ocean which I wanted to replicate. I was careful to choose a portion of sky blended well. All I did was copy this part of the sky and pasted it over the portions I wanted to cover. I repeated the same process with the second line, the line between the beach and the water.

Once, I finished masking the woman, I moved on to the next task. I wanted to darken my figure in the photo to get a better contrast between my profile and the background. This task was simple, I used the Snapseed's "Selective" tool to select my profile, and then I reduced the Brightness of only this area till I achieved the desired effect. That's it!

Story Behind The Photo:

This photo was taken on the beaches of Varadero, Cuba. Cuba is a popular winter destination for many Canadians as it has two main benefits - warm weather and cost effectiveness. I had a third objective to go to Varadero. I write Blog and I wanted to showcase Havana and Varadero to my readers. I also have Travel Photos. So, my husband and I headed out on the last day of our visit to the beach to get some shots of the amazing sunset.

The beach was crowded near our resort, so we walked further along the coast to find a secluded spot. The location was perfect; there was hardly anyone in sight. However, we had to hurry up as the sun was about to set. My husband, who is a newbie photographer himself, got some shots from several angles. Finally he found this amazing angle to shoot from, where the sun was shining right through the gap between my arm and thigh. Unfortunately, a woman who was also filming the sunset was obstructing the perfect shot. So, my husband changed position to exclude her out of the picture, but that meant he couldn't capture the sun rays shining through as shown in the photo. I even tried to lift her up and place her elsewhere as you can see in one of the pictures. All these antics produced some hilarious pictures but not the one we wanted.

Reluctantly my husband captured a photo with the woman in the background. The woman finally moved after a while but the sun had already set and we couldn't repeat the same shot. Since, this was the last day of our trip in Varadero, we had no chances of repeating this shot again the next day. We returned from our trip, slightly disappointed, kicking ourselves for not trying the shots of the beach on our first day in Varadero. However, through the magic of photo editing, I have managed to salvage a beautiful photo. As a commentator, who commented on this picture on my Instagram, says "All's well that ends well!"