Purple House

This colorful house is located in Morehead City. I've been wanting to take pictures of it for quite a while. For one thing, purple is my favorite color, and you don't see too many intense purple houses!

I cropped this section of the photo to use. My Photoshop technique this week is "poster edges." I've used this filter many times before but often wasn't happy with the results. Reading the book, I found that I had the settings set in a way that gave too intense of an effect.

This particular author (Lee Frost, The A-Z of Creative Digital Photography) feels that the filter "poster edges" works best on simple, graphic images, which was why I was out and about taking picture of buildings. The above image shows the filter at a low setting, giving what I feel is a "gentle" effect.

This photo shows the effect at a higher setting - lots more lines in the picture.

For my last photo, I used my buddy, the "sponge filter," to give the image a watercolor effect. For this house, my favorite result is the first one - I like the minimal definition added to the image. Any opinions?

Sunday's Summary

Photoshop's Sponge Filter was pure pleasure to learn and use. Seeing my photographs turn into Impressionist watercolors was a real treat! I'll be playing with a different Photoshop technique, starting tomorrow.

Sponge Filter and Hue-Saturation were used to produce this digital image of blue flowers. I love the colors!

This is the picture I worked with - it's a detail cropped from an original photograph.

Sponge Beach

More of my photographs that I altered using Photoshop's Sponge Filter. Yes, I did get a little carried away with this technique.

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The end. :o)

Sponge Birds

I took some of my favorite photographs of seabirds and used Photoshop's Sponge Filter on them.

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Bye.

Sponge Boats

Before (Photos altered with Photoshop's Sponge Filter and Hue/Saturation)


After

Before

After (my favorite of these three)

Before

After

These photos were taken in Beaufort, North Carolina.

Learning Something New

While I use Photoshop all the time, there are lots of tricks and techniques I've never learned. I've purchased several books on painting and design using Photoshop, and the books look really nice on my bookshelf.... So I've decided it's time to expand my digital horizons. Each week (starting this week) I plan to study a technique in Photoshop to add it to my repertoire. This week's project is the Sponge Filter. Above is a finished image and below is the photo I used.

In this scene, the trees were reflected beautifully in the oh-so-still water. The pansies (yesterday), the red shack on Sunday, and the cows on Saturday were all done using the Sponge Filter. When using this filter, there are three sliding scales, one representing brush size, one for definition, and one for smoothness. What I found was that I needed to have all three scales set on their smallest numbers to get a decent-looking image. I used "one" on each scale for the first image. I played around with several combinations and here are a couple of examples:

Each scale for this image was set at "three."

When I set all three scales at "nine," this abstract image emerged. I also checked all of my Photoshop books to see what the authors did with the Sponge Filter. I can summarize that in a single word - Nothing! Maybe this filter was considered too simple for elaboration, but anyway, I experimented on my own.

This image is cropped from the photograph above, and then treated in Hue/Saturation to alter the colors.

When I applied the Sponge Filter to it, I got this lovely watercolor image. I'll continue playing with Sponge for the rest of this week, then pick something new to try for next week.

Monday's Magic - Pansies

I love the look of a watercolor painting! I wanted to be able to reproduce this effect in Photoshop, working with my photographs. What I found was that an artistic filter called "sponge" gave me the results I wanted. The first picture is the finished digital image.


This second image is the cropped section of the photograph that I used.


And this last photo is the original picture of the pansies. I loved their orange color!