Rob Depaolo

Here’s day seven of our brand new Pic of the Day section via Instagram.  Each day we will be selecting one image a day for our Pick of the Day section on Instagram with the #theappwhisperer.

Furthermore, each month we will also offer an overall prize to the image that receives the most love.  On day 1 we congratulated @endtimewatcher for their fascinating portrait, day 2 consisted of an incredibly atmospheric shot by @the_real_mccoy -‘Colonial Dance’, day 3 we enjoyed a stunning street shot by @ilein, ‘Emotional Weather Report’, day 4 we congratulated @lorenka with her incredible mobile artistry image ‘bring me your alibis’. On day five we welcomed @jackvanheugten as our Pick of the Day with his image ‘three almost glasses of wine, at a table, in a bar’. On day 6 we congratulated @Draman with his image ‘The Door to Reason’ and today we welcome @rdepaolo with his fabulous image entitled ‘Smoke’.

We have also included additional information on this shot, directly taken from @rdepaolo’s Instagram explanation.  When asked ‘how do you make the background pure black or white, do you use an app or use a backdrop…’.  He replied with:

“It depends. Typically I will shoot my subject in front of a solid background, but in some cases, like this one, I don’t have that luxury. The original image had a strong blue background due to the aquarium lighting. All I had to do was adjust the blue/gray level all the way up when converting to b&w and drop the red and green levels way down. That made anything blue in the original photo turn white. I then upped the contrast and increased the brightness level of the white area using a curves control) to brighten it and applied this adjustment with a masking brush so as to not apply it to the jellyfish itself. All editing of this image was done in Filterstorm Neue“.