What Would You Do (#23)

[Nicole]

Really, I did delay this week's WWYD on purpose after I was so late posting it last week. I wanted to give it an extra day so that it got the full attention it should. Next week we should be back to it being posted on Tuesday

This week we have a picture from cjbnc of a bird coming in for a landing.



Available Larger

The rules are simple as always. Make your edits to the picture and come back and share what you've done. Also, don't forget to post what you've actually done so that we can learn from everyone's edits. That's what makes the thread so much fun. Not only do you get to try something new, but you may also learn from everyone else

If you want your picture to be the subject of one of these threads or you have any questions about how the thread works, drop me a PM (and include a link to the medium and larger version of the picture if you want it to be used in the threads).

Now, go forth and edit!

[MikeM]

Ahh so blurry!

I cropped then selected the bird and made a new layer from him which I motion blurred. I also adjusted levels and curves and did some unsharp mask. I was trying to emphasize the blur of the bird over the rest of the photo.

[cjbnc]

This picture was taken with my D40x, 55-200mm VR lens at 200mm, handheld. The bird landed on the dam as I was photographing. It was an overcast morning, so the light is pretty bad and the shutter is slow (1/8s) and blurry.

I thought the softness gave it a surreal sort of quality that might be worth keeping. For my own rendition, I tried to enhance that a bit... making it into an impressionist style painting.



Roughly, what I did was:

- crop
- curves adjustment to fix contrast range and white-balance.
- add 3-layer Orton effect, using my RawExpose method, and masking out some of the blurred layer on the heron
- another curves adjustment, to fix the contrast after Orton-izing
- apply Photoshop's Paint Daubs filter
- duplicate Daubs layer, blend mode soft light, opacity 70%

[Delta]

This stopped being a photograph for me the second it hit the board in photoshop, mostly because I feel like it's unfinished AS a photograph--namely because of the blur. But it's NOT unfinished as a portrait of an unfinished painting!



A brief description (with vague details):

-First things first: Levels and smart sharpen with a gaussian blur effect. I cranked the thing way, way up.

-I bled the color using Photoshop's drippy watercolor brush (which turned out to be my weapon of choice) by turning down the opacity to about 70%, selecting white for my color and using saturation, hue and color for my brush blend styles. This fluxuated as needed in order to get the effects I wanted. By fluctuated, I mean that I adjusted the opacity anywhere from 30-70% in some places.

-Then, looking at the original, I added the colors BACK by base--blue for water, autumn hues for the trees and whatnot. You can see the flucuations in the fullness of color, as the left side of the portrait is more complete than the rest.

-To give it that "painted" feeling, I raised my opacity and used a normal brush type to spalsh a few deeper hues onto the upper right section of the frame and left them there.

-That left the bird and the tree behind him. I bled all the color there.

-Now for the fun part: Duplicated layer >> type: Overlay. Made it darker.

-Used a watercolor filter on the top layer, then backed it down as needed by adjusting the opacity of the layer.

-Applied a gradient with a dark blue on the left and white on the right to suck the color out just a bit more and give a more complete feel to the left side.

-Finally, to help get the green reflections out of the waterfall, I drew a box around it and did a selective hue / saturation drain on the greens. The graident I'd done before did most of the worth, and photoshop didn't want to read the leaves as green. So I tweaked it a little more with color balance.

And there you have it--I think.

Enjoy!

[windrider86]

* Cropped
* duplicated to saturation and raised the saturation levels
* dupilcated - screen
* duplicated screen again
* duplicated added gaussian blur at 9.5 pixels
* duplicated again to mulitply
* merged all
* zoomed in and painted over bird with a white at about 35 opcaity and then smudged the edges
* added borders

[Delta]

Originally Posted by windrider86

* added borders

Which I love. Good job with the borders. The green stripe really jives with the way you've got the shot arranged. Wish I'd have thought to do that.

[Teewinot]

GOAL: Make it look like an oil painting (the first solution I could think of for the blur).

What I did (in PSP XI):
-Cropped significantly to highlight the bird more
-Unsharp mask (Radius 75, strength 50) for contrast
-Applied a brush strokes filter (can't remember exact settings)
-Increased saturation to make it more colorful
-Adjusted histogram midtones to boost contrast just a bit more.
-Added ornate picture frame and changed mat color to go with photo.

[peeperita]

i wanted this to be a painting as well....although something went awry on the upload to flickr as this image looks far darker than it did in ps.....i had a crash last weekend and had to get a new box and reload everything....if someone has some insight to this problem, i sure would appreciate a reply....

anyway, here it is...



i cropped with a slight adjustment to the leveling of the frame...used levels and shadows/highlights to make the water appear less white...sharpened....duplicated the layer....used the dry brush filter and set it to overlay to pop out the colors...decreased the opacity of this layer...the blues started bothering me so i used a color adjustment layer of orange, set to color and decreased the opacity....added a vignette on a seperate layer and again used the overlay blending to help seperate the water as it fell....freaked out about the bits of sky in the upper left of the frame and went back, cloning it out of the first two layers....

i'm so bummed that this image went so dark when it uploaded.....

thanks

peeper

[Nicole]

If you reloaded all your programs and it's all dark now when you upload, did you make sure that you're saving your pictures in sRGB if your program has color profiles? It might just be that you changed it on your old box and forgot.

[peeperita]

thanks for being there, nicole...i'm not sure that i follow you....

i started nosing around my computer and realized that when i open an image in ps and then opened the same image with my viewer, that the two do not match up....the viewer image looks just like what's appearing on flickr......

care to keep holding an old lady's hand on this?