Playing with a Kaleidoscope Effect

 

A friend on FaceBook posted a photo that he had altered with a kaleidoscope effect in Paint Shop Pro and I wondered if I could do that in Photoshop. Apparently PSP has an automated way of doing it but Photoshop expects you to know how to do it yourself, step-by-step. It turns out that it isn't hard. I found a YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bsaQXOCD1I that takes you through the process. The result above is a bit different however because I started with an already modified image that I had turned inside out (see http://jims-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/12/going-round-again.html) that looked like this...

And the orginal was this photo cropped square...

I decided to see how the kaleidoscope effect would look if I started with the cropped original that was not 'inside out' and got this...

I did not follow the YouTube instructions exactly. He tells you at several points to duplicate the current layer and either flip or rotate it 45° and then make the blending mode of the upper layer "Darken". I experimented with the blending mode to get the effect I liked best. Bear in mind that not all blending modes will result in the upper layer showing all the detail in the layer beneath so look carefully at the result to insure that you are getting the full kaleidoscope effect.

I suspect that the same steps would would work in other editing software and you could create an action to run the whole process. If you wanted to play with the blending mode like I did, you could insert pauses at the appropriate points and simply resume the action after you had chosen which blending mode you wanted.

These photos are all copyrighted. If you want to share them, please link to this post. Playing in Photoshop is a good way to spend time during the pandemic. Enjoy, get vaccinated and stay healthy.

Jim