Whats ya look'n at? Playing with curves

Here is a change I like to make to a photo. I suppose the end result might satisfy my own eyes but not necessarily yours.

Anyways, this is the photo I started with. I think the swan was just coming out of the water, but it looks like a 'whats ya look'n at' photo. :) The feathers are pure white, hard to see the beauty of the plumage.



The photo negative I posted a few days ago really accentuate those features our eyes cannot discern because there is too much white. That is all the photo negative really does for me though. You see the details but not the beauty of the swan.

So here is a different approach. I played with the colour curve in The Gimp, an excellent graphics manipulation software for Linux and Windows. I changed the straight line to a sinusoidal curve (see screen capture below) to accentuate the yellow hue in the feather -- the sun was low on the horizon. Click on the image to see the difference. I think the plumage looks spectacular!