It's been an interesting few weeks since my last post. Life is crazy busy and seems to be on a spiral of ever more busy for the near future - certainly to the end of the year. So it's nice to view a few pictures of old, and maybe apply some new things to them. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but you can give an old photo an interesting new presentation with some new photoshop techniques.
My first effort is an old shot that I made many years ago with a PowerShot S30 digital camera, some 3.2 megapixels of great camera in the days of microdrives, 128MB CF cards and such things. What i've done is to crop the image to the presentation you see, then make duplicate layers of it. For the first I then worked with the channel mixer to give me some contrasty black and white of the reeds and the lake surface - almost like a lith film look. Secondly I punched the blue reflection of the sky with a little of the Scott Kelby 7-point photoshop LAB mode trick. The some judicious blending and here you have an unrepeatable alternative view of what was once a landscape image of some plants on the edge of a lake.
Then for something rather different and using a technique found in a post on the dpreview.com EOS-1D forums. Here the original image has been duped to a new layer and then the photoshop reduce noise filter used with full strength, and zero details preserevd and zero details sharpened. You run this filter 3 or maybe 4 times in succession then sharpen with an unsharp mask using a mid-range 100 amount and 200 radius and say 7-15 threshold. Then I blended the newly adjusted layer in using a hard light and lowered the opacity a bit. A bit more masked levels and a vignette completed the results. Here's the original so called straight image.
I quite like this pictorial look. Art it isn't but I'm really keen to see how it looks in print. I also think the opening image could use a bit of this painterly technique to bring it up from the mere record shot category.
- p4pictures -
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