This picture of the flowers on the dock with the buildings behind it was taken this summer in Amsterdam during my travels in Europe. The essence of the original image is similar, the original image shows more of the building in the background and the water, but the focus for the viewer is now cleaner and more clear. I cropped in on potted flowers/dock/boat, because that's what I was most interested in when I captured the image. The height of the building, it's additional windows, and other information in the photograph distracted the viewer from what I wanted to illuminate. Originally this was a color photo, and I chose Photoshop instead of Fireworks to edit the image. Aside from cropping, I also used Photoshop's lens option to put an orange filter over the image, took away the remaining color to make it sepia. Then I used the dodge and burn tool to dramatize the photo which makes it more interesting. Since the image is monochromatic I optimized it not only as a jpeg, but as a gif and png too. I choose to keep the file as a jpeg because the dodge and burn detail I added to the photograph showed up best in the jpeg format. As a gif and png, the slight variations in color were not coming through as well.

When I was editing this photograph I wanted to practice primarily on the creation of the border. That is why I only made minimal changes to original photo. Besides cropping out bushes in the images foreground and some excess of the images' landscape, the essence of the photo remains intact. For the photograph's coloring I lessened the brightness, contrast, and saturation because the color pallet of my blog design has earthy tones and an overall lack of color saturation. I used Photoshop to edit the image and make its border and used the gradient tool to darken the edges, and a filter to create the drop shadow. This image has also been optimized as a jpg because all the color in the photograph.