Photoshop Filter Effects

I attended the opening of the juried show at Northwind Gallery in Saranac Lake last night and a couple of photographer friends asked my opinion of one of the works there, "is it a photograph or some other medium?". Upon examining it I was 99% certain that it was a manipulated photograph. It looked a bit like a painting but the surface didn't appear to have any of the physical texture of the paint. It was perfectly smooth like an inkjet print of a photo. OTOH it seemed to have an applied texture image that looked like a cross between film grain and paint stokes. I decided this afternoon to try to duplicate the effect with one of my photos. This is what I came up with.

After duplicating the base layer I went to my Topaz Texture Effects 2 filters and chose Vintage>Sharp and Gritty. I modified that by pushing up the grain sliders significantly. That gave me the sort of grain effect I was looking for but I was missing the painterly elements. I added a curves layer to increase the contrast then Used Shift/Ctrl/Alt/E to make a new layer that combined the existing layers and used Topaz Simplifier 4 to 'clump' pixels together for the painterly effect. I settled on 15 on the simplifier slider and turned off the Adjustments and Edges tabs that are part of the default effect. 

At that point, I got the above image but had mostly lost the grain effect in the simplifier filter so I reduced the opacity of the top layer to 75% so that more of the grain effect would show and ended up with this

I'm not sure that the differences will be that evident in the blog post but if you click on either photo you can view it a bit larger and flip between the two with your arrow keys. I think I prefer the top photo because I like the smoother effect. I've never been fond of grain but this was an exercise to see if I could reproduce the effect I'd seen at the show. I don't think I matched it entirely but I came close and experiments like this are useful for expanding one's vision. Feel free to comment if you prefer one over the other and why you like it more.

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Iris Simplified

Topaz Simplify is probably my favorite filter. With this photo, I used a double dose. Simplify has numerous presets which you can modify with sliders (and I often do) but this one uses two different presets in layers with the blending of the upper one set to "Luminance" and opacity reduced to 60%. I rather like the effect. Click on the image to see it larger.

Mini Adventure & a Photoshop Tip

I have been goofing off on posting again. I didn't realize until I checked that it had been more than a month.

Yesterday a hiking friend and I engaged in a mini adventure. It was more mini than planned because of the heat. We originally intended to go to the pastel show at VIEW in Old Forge and climb the Rondax fire tower on Bald Mt. on the way home but with the temperature in the 90s and a heat index in the 100s we settled for visits to Buttermilk Falls and Bog River falls instead (no mountain climbing involved). These photos are all from Buttermilk Falls, several are of the small cedar island in mid-river below the falls. None are the fall. I have numerous photos of he falls and the light was not good for photographing the falls. I was intentionally looking at the surrounding area to see what else was of interest the immediate area. Answer? A lot, huge rocks, roots, trees. I especially like this island of cedar trees that somehow survive the spring runoff year after year. You can see where ice flows bash them on the upstream side when the ice goes out in the spring.

The Photoshop tip I want o share involves the use of text in Photoshop. Once upon a time when adding text to an image, in my case a watermark, I could click the spot where I wanted text with the text tool and then right-click to get a dialog that included "Paste" to paste some saved text. Somewhere several versions ago in the updates to Photoshop that changed and a right click instead deleted the text layer I had just created. When I first experienced this Edit>Paste didn't work either but now it does. I know others have had problems with this because I have searched Google for solutions and found lots of frustration over it. The bad news: I have to unlearn my reflex habit of right-clicking to paste text. The good news: Edit>Paste is working again so I don't have to retype the watermark text for every photo in a batch.

Below are the rest of the photos from our outing. Buttermilk Falls is below (South of) Long Lake in the Adirondacks on North Point Rd.

As always, please respect my copyright and do not repost or otherwise use the photos elsewhere without my permission.