Painterly effect without heavy post production

[SumPics]

Read a fuller description with additional images including the SOOC jpeg at That’s so Photoshopped! SumPics Photo Blog.


I shot this from my home office, through a somewhat dirty window on a slightly hazy morning with frost on the ground outside. It's important to note that I may not be able to duplicate this, but I think it's possible. What you need to do is take a picture that you expect to heavily crop. Rain, fog, mist, snow, sleet, or any other non-opaque obstruction should help to create the effect.

1/50th of a second at f5.6 and ISO 200

Canon 7D, Canon 28-135 IS USM at 135mm

I cropped it so the barn would be in the lower left as the primary focal point on a rule of thirds intersection.

There was very little post production. That is the whole point of this particular shot. With the cropping and environmental conditions it looks like a painting with almost no post production. The post production step that made the most difference was sharpening in Lightroom. I sharpened this image to 121 with a radius of 1.5.

The initial reason for taking this photo was to see whether I could get a usable shot of this barn from inside my house. I was testing the zoom on the 28-135. One of the points I make in my blog is that you shouldn't discount a shot right away. It was a happy accident that I saw this effect when I cropped the image to get a better view of the barn to determine how I might compose a future shot.

[OsmosisStudios]

Sorry but this just looks like a poor, soft picture. 1/50th at 135mm (~210 equiv) is just gonna cause motion blur.

[SumPics]

Thanks for the reply Osmosis. It's hard sometimes to listen to an opinion that is at complete odds with my own. I agree with you that normally I would not expect to freehand a shot at 135mm and 1/50th of a second, however I was not planning on ever using this shot. To me, this shot does not really look like a photograph at all and that was what I was building on in my post.

This is a soft shot, there is no doubt about that. The slight camera shake, the smudges on the window I was shooting through, and the atmospheric conditions (light fog and hazy sky) all contribute to making this shot something that I would normally have deleted. But when I zoomed in on the shot after putting it on the computer I saw an opportunity and tried something new.

Do I think this particular shot would ever sell as an art print? No, there are too many compositional problems... the tree blocking the barn and the power lines in the background are the two biggest problems I have with this photo. What I saw in this shot was an opportunity to add something to my tool bag. It may be a tricky, underhanded, and cheap way to salvage an otherwise unusable shot at some point in the future or it might be that I attempt to use the experience gained from this shot and purposefully shoot something that to me looks like an oil painting.

The limitations of the boards here (1 picture per post) precluded me from adding the photoshop version of this photo and I wanted to show the illustration of very little post production work so I chose to display the version that I did. The photoshop version has a copy of the background layer with a high-pass filter applied and set to soft light. This version has much more pronounced brush strokes than the one I posted here on DPS. You can view the photoshop version in my blog post which is linked in my original post.

[OsmosisStudios]

The limitations of the boards here (1 picture per post) precluded me from adding the photoshop version of this photo and I wanted to show the illustration of very little post production work so I chose to display the version that I did. .

Limit is 4 images per post, actually.

I just don't think your example was a very good demonstration of a "painterly" effect.

[SumPics]

From "The 'Rules' for this 'How I Took It' Forum" sticky

Here's how to participate:

For image posters

1. Start a new thread for each photo
2. Post 1 image only per thread

And you are correct that the image I used is not the best example of a painterly effect since painterly should actually show brush strokes. This is a better example, but is also more heavily processed as I mentioned in my earlier posts.

[OsmosisStudios]

That rule is to curb people from posting four different images: in this case we're talking about a progression of sorts. That's fine. You'll also see people posting their final image and then "behind the scenes" shots of a setup.

This second image is much more "painterly". The effect works rather well; not my cup of tea, but a nice effect nonetheless.

[Cysar Soriano]

hello guys.
if you were looking for better brush strokes like >>>


you should try Pixel bender ..
its free from adobe

[bigwill722]

That looks awesome, I might have to get that.

[SumPics]

That rule is to curb people from posting four different images: in this case we're talking about a progression of sorts. That's fine. You'll also see people posting their final image and then "behind the scenes" shots of a setup.

This second image is much more "painterly". The effect works rather well; not my cup of tea, but a nice effect nonetheless.

Thanks for the tip on posting multiple images. I posted the additional one in the reply because it wasn't part of the original post, but now that I know I will probably use more images in my future initial posts