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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Artistic License

Morning Light

Sometimes the image is all about light, shape, color and too much detail detracts from what I want to 'say' in the image. When I get one of those images I reach into my plugin toolbox and pull out Topaz's Simplifier. I have been using it for years. It started life as BUZZ Simplifier and was put out by a British company whose name I can't recall at the moment. That company went belly up and for a while, I couldn't get updates then Topaz stepped in with their version.

Simplifier groups pixels of similar tone & hue and averages them into clumps. The number of pixels averaged (and thus the size of the clumps of color) is controlled with a slider that goes from very small clumps to almost a posterized image. The original BUZZ filter would go so far that it averaged the entire image but there really isn't much use for that and if you want to I think there is a built-in tool in PS that will do that. The default setting on Topaz's version is higher (bigger clumps) than I usually want and I can't recall ever going higher than the default.

The result is an image that looks a lot like a painting because it does pretty much what painters (except for photorealistic painters) do. I like the effect on some images. I have occasionally been told in the past that I shouldn't call these photographs anymore because they don't 'look photographic'. I don't really care if others prefer to think of them in other terms. I make "images" that I like, that express what I want to express about the subject and render them by whatever means best expresses what I want to show the world. To me, they are still photographs. You may refer to them any way you wish. The terms aren't important, the image is what is important. Here is a group of recent creations using both the camera and the computer. I hope you enjoy them visually and don't get hung up in what to call them.

"OPEN"

"Hay Tedder"

Gold over Gold

"Be Mine"

Click on an image to see it larger. Prints are available. Email me telling me what you want (image/size/your location etc.) and I will reply with a price quote that includes shipping. Please respect my copyright and do not repost any part of this blog elsewhere without my express permission.