Bring life to dull photos

I am indebted to my wife, Donna, for this tip. She uses the free google photo handling software called Picasa (download it free from http://picasa.google.com/), which not only sorts your photos into one easy to use place, but also has lots of fixes, tunings and effects that you can apply to your photos. So I began to play with it to see what it could do.

I chose a photo that didn't show much promise as something to paint from. It was of some rusty bits of junk in an old shed - all darks and rust browns and not terribly exciting. But by fiddling around with it in Picasa I managed to brighten it so the objects hidden in the dark could be seen, and enhanced the colours, so that browns turned into greens, reds, oranges and yellows, and then I sharpened it and cropped it as well. The end result was a photo with much more interest in it, and something that could be used to make a painting (possibly as an abstract).

So, find some of your most boring photos and have a go with a programme such as this and see what you can do. You may not even use the photos in the end to paint from, but the process of changing them may spark off other ideas that may inspire your painting.