The Backdoorhippie Six Sets of Sixty-One for '16

BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
OK, so I have some specific photography goals I want to accomplish this year, as well as some equipment decisions I need to make that I've talked about elsewhere. Anyway, there will be artifacts, many of which I probably wouldn't post elsewhere, but anything I might gain from them should probably be shared, so a commitment to get them online may just keep a fire lit under my arse.

Since 366 straight days of this is a daunting task, I'm taking this leap year opportunity to break it into manageable chunks.

I should add that some shots may be used on other sites, including contest sites that may require me to delay posting them here for a short time, so if things need to be posted in order then you may notice short lapses in the content. Or I may simply put in a placeholder post and post content when it's safe to do so.

Regardless, if the cycle breaks I promise to say something.
 
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BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
January 1

Had a couple inquiries about my Sigma macro as a lens for non-macro functions. Questions about bokeh when used in a non-macro context were among them, so I shot a set of samples in a "near but not macro" context.

Here are the results...

f4
20160101-f4.jpg


f5.6
20160101-f5.6.jpg


f8
20160101-f8.jpg


f11
20160101-f11.jpg


f16
20160101-f16.jpg


f22
20160101-f22.jpg


f32
20160101-f32.jpg


Aside from noticing that my sensor needed cleaning (LOL), I took interest in how some colors were dominant in the bokeh at wider apertures. Additionally, while completely unintended, I thought it was interesting to see how the background light played with the out of focus dog, almost severing its head at some apertures.

I should note that I accidentally shot these in aperture priority instead of manual, which is why the relationship between aperture and shutter speed may not be consistent (I changed the aperture 1 full stop between shots but in some cases the shutter speed changed by less/more - I compensated for this in Lightroom).
 
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hark

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
NICE!!! The bokeh of the lights is very interesting as is your observation of the color intensity with certain apertures. I remember from my days shooting a 35mm manual Minolta camera, at times the shutter speed would fluctuate between two values. I haven't noticed it with DSLR's although I suspect it still happens like it did here.
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
January 2

I suffer from occasional and severe bouts of insomnia. Almost never is it an issue with falling asleep, but it's an issue with getting back to sleep after waking up. When I know it'll be hours in bed before I get back to sleep I've taken to heading downstairs so I don't toss around and piss off the Mrs. I've also taken to making sure that I leave my laptop and a set of headphones in the family room so I can at least be entertained in my waking moments. Rather than just Netflixing the night away, I've recently decided to take those opportunities to try and learn something, so I dig into a set of bookmarks called "Whenever I Get To It" and find something I've put off for later.

This night I dug into a tutorial about creating Twirl images in Photoshop. I'd seen some in Photoshop groups and also on some photography challenge sites I participate in. I thought they were cool, even if I consider them more "digital art" than "photographs", but I wondered if the techniques used could be applied to photo processing. Answer? Not really. But that doesn't mean that I couldn't make a small chunk of change selling metal prints of these late in the day at some art show somewhere where entertainment and adult beverages are of equal importance. LOL

The basis of it is transforming an "ordinary photograph" in to a twisted set of colors and lines. If you're really interested, the tutorial I followed can be found here.

Behold, the ordinary photograph:
20160102-Before.jpg


And what I was able to cull from it in about 10 minutes:
20160102-After.jpg



If you follow the basic steps of the tutorial with my original photograph you'll get something different. I didn't like the dark-heavy top of my result after the basic steps so I took the top layer in the two layer stack and rotated it 180 degrees (flipping it horizontally would have ruined the bi-directional twisting necessary for this effect). From there, I used Detail Extraction in Color Efex 4 and Camera Raw Filter to boost Clarity and to apply a little bit of Lens Distortion correction to pull the center out a bit.

I decided to turn the steps into a Photoshop Action so I don't have to do it manually every time. I changed the steps somewhat so that I use a Layer 0 instead of a background so I can make the two combined layers Smart Objects and adjust the amount of Twirl in the filter after the fact. PM me if you're interested in the Action, but truth is, I just use the defaults in the tutorial (3 steps of Radial Blue and then two layers of Twist), so you can create your own following the steps.


Edit to add that the tutorial steps for this will work with Photoshop Elements as well.
 
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hark

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
:eyetwitch: Words elude me right now! So glad you are sharing--you always were one to raise the bar! :cheerful:

This effect is absolutely gorgeous!
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
hark said:
:eyetwitch: Words elude me right now! So glad you are sharing--you always were one to raise the bar! :cheerful:

This effect is absolutely gorgeous!
Click to expand...

Thanks, but this is one where it's all about the technique and what the software can do not a whole lot else, the photography in particular. So, while I'm happy this came out the way it did and that it's eye pleasing, I find the results almost always cool enough that someone would go "Wow" without knowing how it's done, and unless you do some additional manipulation it leaves you feeling like you're making cookie cutter art.

For example, I went to Bing image search and grabbed the first thing I saw, ran it through the default tutorial steps (took 2 seconds with my premade action since it was a small jpeg), chose a blend mode I liked best (Pin Light in this case), and then applied a double dose of Clarity using Camera Raw Filter. Voila, before and after in about a minute...

3e3ab2b3d89e19d96e4a9a47e78a685e.jpg


Honestly, it almost made me feel dirty how easy it is to do stuff. If there's creativity involved it comes with what you do from here, but hey, I now have something to do when I'm bored out of my skull, right? LOL
 
M

Moab Man

Senior Member
I've done the swirl edits and it's always amazing what you find hidden inside a picture when you swirl it. Never thought of making it an action though, guess what I'll be doing LOL.
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
Moab Man said:
I've done the swirl edits and it's always amazing what you find hidden inside a picture when you swirl it. Never thought of making it an action though, guess what I'll be doing LOL.
Click to expand...

It is my absolutely inability to remember the stuff I used to know when I'm looking for something different to do that caused me to say, "You know, I should make this an action so I don't forget that I know how to do this." LOL
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
January 3

I'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...

th.jpg


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...

20160103-1-LR Edits.jpg



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.

20160103-2-Impression.jpg



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.

20160103-3-Lighter Color 100.jpg



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

20160103-4-Luminosity 40.jpg



Normal

20160103-5-Normal 40.jpg



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.
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
January 4

I needed to shoot a Circle theme for a photo challenge (the circle shape is a key element in the photo). Had a few ideas and shot a bunch of stuff. Here's one that didn't make the cut.

20160104.jpg
 
AC016

AC016

Senior Member
BackdoorHippie said:
January 2

I suffer from occasional and severe bouts of insomnia. Almost never is it an issue with falling asleep, but it's an issue with getting back to sleep after waking up. When I know it'll be hours in bed before I get back to sleep I've taken to heading downstairs so I don't toss around and piss off the Mrs. I've also taken to making sure that I leave my laptop and a set of headphones in the family room so I can at least be entertained in my waking moments. Rather than just Netflixing the night away, I've recently decided to take those opportunities to try and learn something, so I dig into a set of bookmarks called "Whenever I Get To It" and find something I've put off for later.

This night I dug into a tutorial about creating Twirl images in Photoshop. I'd seen some in Photoshop groups and also on some photography challenge sites I participate in. I thought they were cool, even if I consider them more "digital art" than "photographs", but I wondered if the techniques used could be applied to photo processing. Answer? Not really. But that doesn't mean that I couldn't make a small chunk of change selling metal prints of these late in the day at some art show somewhere where entertainment and adult beverages are of equal importance. LOL

The basis of it is transforming an "ordinary photograph" in to a twisted set of colors and lines. If you're really interested, the tutorial I followed can be found here.

Behold, the ordinary photograph:
View attachment 193084

And what I was able to cull from it in about 10 minutes:
View attachment 193083


If you follow the basic steps of the tutorial with my original photograph you'll get something different. I didn't like the dark-heavy top of my result after the basic steps so I took the top layer in the two layer stack and rotated it 180 degrees (flipping it horizontally would have ruined the bi-directional twisting necessary for this effect). From there, I used Detail Extraction in Color Efex 4 and Camera Raw Filter to boost Clarity and to apply a little bit of Lens Distortion correction to pull the center out a bit.

I decided to turn the steps into a Photoshop Action so I don't have to do it manually every time. I changed the steps somewhat so that I use a Layer 0 instead of a background so I can make the two combined layers Smart Objects and adjust the amount of Twirl in the filter after the fact. PM me if you're interested in the Action, but truth is, I just use the defaults in the tutorial (3 steps of Radial Blue and then two layers of Twist), so you can create your own following the steps.


Edit to add that the tutorial steps for this will work with Photoshop Elements as well.
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting this tutorial. I did one last night and i do like the effect. It's always fun to learn something new, especially with Photoshop. Thanks
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
January 6

Was hoping for a little more than what I got when I stepped out into the frigid morning yesterday for the 10 minutes of free time I had as the sun was shining on the frost all over everything. Alas, I had the wrong lens and the sun was at a bad angle (20 minutes later would have been perfect - I know, I saw it out my window as I was on my all day conference call). But, it's something, and I'm 6 in a row. LOL

20160106.jpg
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
January 7

Shot something for a photo challenge that I'll link back in a week or so. What you get today is a failed attempt to get a bird in flight shot. Just over top of the building in the background are some hills and what was a really nice morning sky, and my attempt to get these Canadian Geese to fly into it failed miserably. Sometimes it's too cold to cooperate and they never got more than 6 inches off the ground, and most of them just ran.

20160107.jpg
 
hark

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
BackdoorHippie said:
January 3

I'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...

View attachment 193265

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...

View attachment 193267


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.

View attachment 193268


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.

View attachment 193269


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

View attachment 193271


Normal

View attachment 193272


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.
Click to expand...

I found myself coming back to look at these images because the other day I took a photo that is too branchy (for lack of a better word). I'm not inclined to get Topaz yet because the Nik Collection is first on my choice of software, but it's amazing to see the difference in editing between these photos! Thanks for sharing this information, Jake. :)
 
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