Friday, March 03, 2006

Q: that subtle textured effect ?

Winter Storm Approaching

I love your "Winter Storm Approaching" photo. Do you mind if I ask what tools did you used to get that subtle textured effect that looks almost like a painting?
--jackie

Hi Jackie, I appreciate your kind comments. I didn't use any filter on that picture, what I did was actually "paint" over the photo with colors picked from the original photo and saturated just slightly using an overlay brush and an overlay layer.

That is, I set the both the brush and the new layer to overlay and then painted onto the water and clouds etc with a very low opacity fuzzy brush. I used tourquoises, yellows, greens and greys to try to enhance the stormy look. The clouds were not original. There were stormy clouds in the original, but they were dull so I put new clouds in a layer behind the picture and then stretched, rotated and positioned them exactly as I wanted with the opacity of the foreground lowered, returned the opacity of the foreground to full and carefully erased the old clouds for the new before painting them with yellows and greens etc. The new clouds I used were taken about the same time.

The picture was taken in low light so I used I high ISO which also contributes a grainy texture which I ameliorated a little with the raw dialogue in PS. (Color noise reduction or something).

I appreciate your attention and interest. Mary :-)

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