Weekly Photo Challenge: Object

The Weekly Photo Challenge prompt, started with the idea of telling a story using an object.  Mine tells the story of a very busy weekend:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/60

This is a chalk bag that was a gift to my youngest rock climber who had a birthday recently.  This past weekend a party was held in her honor at the rock climbing gym where we climb.

I will show the original photo at the bottom, but I was interested in taking a pretty standard photo and editing it in Camera Raw, which is something that I am reading about in conjunction with the Photoshop class I am taking.  The textbook for my class is Adobe Photoshop CC for Photographers by Martin Evening which I am finding to be a really good resource.

So, I opened the original photo in Camera Raw and in the Basic settings made the following changes:

1. Increased the temperature
2. Increased the exposure
3. Increased the contrast
4. Decreased the highlights
5. Increased the shadows
6. Decreased the whites
7. Decreased the blacks
8. Increased the clarity
9. Increased the vibrance

I made all these changes using the various sliders and just adjusting until I created an image that I liked.

To make the border, I opened the image in Photoshop.  I cropped the image and then made a rectangular selection to the interior of the crop that would eventually make my new border. Then I made a mask on that layer.  Then I went to Select-Refine Mask- and I increased the radius slider.  That creates the ragged border.  From there I made a layer underneath and filled it with the brown color.

Here is the original, so you can see what I started with:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/60

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.  Do you use Camera Raw? I am finding it to be a pretty powerful editing tool, helpful before I even get started in Photoshop.

Cheers!