I was whiling away some time, relaxing after work today, and decided to play around in Photoshop with a picture of a California poppy I got awhile back. This is the original:
Not bad. Not great,perhaps, but not bad. Check out the shades of yellow, and the nice effect of the stamens (pistils? I’m not sure) and the shadows in the middle.
Then I started messing around with filters. This first one is the dry brush filter:
Kinda interesting. Not exactly art, but kinda interesting.
Next is the paint daubs filter, with the sparkle option:
Kinda cool. Maybe getting close to something worth printing out.
Then I found something called “conté crayon”. I have absolutely no idea what that would be in real life, but I tried it out, and got this:
Looks like something you could make a wallpaper pattern out of.
Still messing around, found something called “sumi-e”. Again, I have no clue as to what that would be in reality. Here in virtual reality, it produced this:
It feels to me like it’s almost achieving its intended effect, but not quite. I maxed out the settings, but I wanted even more. But since I don’t know what I’m doing, or what “sumi-e” should look like. . . Oh well.
The last one is using the Gradient filter. There are a bunch of options under that, many of which were petty cool, but I settled on this one:
That one I’d used before, and got some nice effects in combination with other manipulations. This one, I just settled for the one filter.
I just love digital photography, and Photoshop. I’ve always considered myself to be, shall we say, art challenged; I can’t draw, or sculpt, or anything. No talent whatsoever. If art were considered a basic skill, the way math is, I’d have been labeled as having special needs long ago. But the digital photography makes it possible for me to fake it, or at least to make pretty pictures. I don’t have to know what I’m doing, I can just mess around, and if I take enough pictures, and mess around long enough, eventually I end up with something I like. The miracles of modern technology!
So–which one do you like best?
I like the “sumi-e” best (no idea what it is though). And that last one is a very close second.
I totally agree about technology. I *love* living in this day and age (or rather…I would if we hadn’t elected Dubya).
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(or rather…I would if we hadn’t elected Dubya).
I knew I liked you 🙂
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I’m looking at the photos on a Blackberry, which hardly does them justice, but both our computers are in use.
Anyway, I like the last one best. It might be nice if there were more of the original, rich colours in it, while still achieving the gradations somehow ¤dash; if digital equipment could achieve the best elements of both B&W and colour photography simultaneously.
But it’s beautiful as it is — I don’t mean to detract from what you’ve achieved.
And I totally relate to your remarks about digital photography. I, too, am artistically challenged, but I can produce at least some results worth sharing with the new technology.
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