Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BackdoorArts" data-source="post: 521672" data-attributes="member: 9240">January 3I've always liked shooting landscapes and outdoors in general.  I've also taken an interest in learning a bit about art history and it seems that the first thing people learn to paint are landscapes...[ATTACH=full]193265[/ATTACH]I managed to acquire a bunch of the Topaz tools and I've found myself drawn to their Impression module that essentially stylizes your image as various different types of paintings.  While some may use the tool to simply produce a "painting" of their photo I've found it useful to use that rendering in various blend modes with the original.  The app lets you blend in Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light, and Hard Light modes (0-100%) and output the result, but I prefer to simply output the "painting" and do the blending in Photoshop.I shot this image while out birding Sunday morning (I could have posted my bird images, but thought this more interesting) and did basic edits in Lightroom only...[ATTACH=full]193267[/ATTACH]It's OK, but it has a busy-ness to it with all the branches that makes it overall distracting to me.  The nice thing about Impression is that it can greatly simplify stuff like this.  One of my favorite presets for an image like this are the Georgia O'Keefe presets in Impression.  They give a really nice flow to all the lines and add life to it.  I took the preset straight out of the app except that I removed the canvas texturing.[ATTACH=full]193268[/ATTACH]As you can see a lot of the noise is gone.  Generally I've already gone through the blend modes available in Impression and have an idea of where I want to go, but still, I'll simply do a toggle through all the blend modes first.  If you don't know, the easiest way to do that is to hit control-V to activate the move tool (this is in PS/PSE) and the use Shift + and Shift - to scroll through the blend modes with the Impression layer as the active layer.  More times than not the effect can be too intense at 100% Opacity, but in this case I thought the Lighter Color blend mode rendered a rather nice result.[ATTACH=full]193269[/ATTACH]A little too painterly, but I wanted to show it to you anyway.  I find that blending tends to work best and still look natural somewhere around 40% Opacity regardless of blend mode.  I find that I tend to use the two of the ones they have, Normal and Soft Light, the most.  Multiply can yield some interesting effects but it overly darkens even at 40% Opacity, so I will use a Levels adjustment and slide the midrange point until it lightens it sufficiently.  With this example I chose Normal and Luminosity modes at 40%, with Luminosity being my preference because it was slightly less saturated.  Luminosity[ATTACH=full]193271[/ATTACH]Normal[ATTACH=full]193272[/ATTACH]Typically to finish it I might have masked the effect in the sky or used a blur layer to get rid of some of the intense color variation, but I wanted you to see what's what.  Again, not something to use all the time, but it's helped me "save" some otherwise funky images.</blockquote>

Verification