Project 5: Focus and Filters

One of the things I learned the most from reading Chapter 8 of the text was to use more than one filter for each image. When I have used filters before I've just tried applying one per image. Using more that one filter can add more depth to an image effect as well as creating a dizzying array of possibilities. I felt pretty overwhelmed at the possibilities.


Here is my original photograph:

This is a photo of part of the Mendenhall refuge in Juneau I had taken a couple years ago. It was taken during really rainy, stormy weather so it has sort of a painterly effect to begin with. I decided to try to apply three different artistic effects to the photograph. The first was to make it look like an oil or acrylic painting. The second was to make it look like a pastel drawing. The third was to make it look like a watercolor and ink painting. You really need to enlarge these images to really see the effects. They don't show up as well as these smaller images on this blog.


This first image I tried to make look like an oil or acrylic painting. I first choose Paint Daubs as a filter and adjusted the brush size and sharpness until I liked it. I also chose Wide Sharp for brush type. The result created an effect that looked like painting but it lacked depth. I created a new filter layer in the filter gallery and experimented around until I found the Dark Strokes filter. That added the darker color of paint strokes to the image. At first it was way too dark so I adjusted the black intensity filter down to 0, which still darkened the image but did not overwhelm it.


The second image I tried to make look like a pastel drawing. I chose the rough pastels filter from the filter gallery and then added a new filter layer. Then after experimenting with some different filters I also chose the sprayed strokes filter. Combined with the rough pastels filter it seemed to make the pastel effect look more natural.


The last effect I tried was to try to make the image look like a watercolor with ink drawing. I chose the watercolor effect from the filter gallery and then added another filter layer and choose ink outlines. I adjusted the ink outlines to minimize the amount of dark ink marks on the image.
I've found that experimenting with which filter you apply first does make a difference. I've also realized that the size of your final image is important in how you adjust these filters.

Project 4 - Coloring Scanned Artwork: Variations

To get the baseline black and white image I followed the instructions in the text to double the width of the canvas, select, clone and use the Free Transform command. I then flipped the horizontal, nudged the selection into place and loaded the RGB channel as a selection. Again following the text I reversed the selection, made the line art layer and then filled the selection with black. I selected the background layer, then deselected it and filled it with white. I then locked the transparency of the line art layer. I made several copies of this image to try different things.

It was pretty overwhelming to look at all the brush presets because there was so many to choose from. For the first image I finally choose a basic brush at 60px and and a special effect brush called hypno lines that had some interesting patterns. I brushed over the image with the 60px basic brush with a darker color and then used the hypno lines brush with a lighter color to create some texture. This was pretty easy to do because I locked the transparency of the line art layer.

For the next image I first set the foreground color to a dark warm brown and with a basic brush of 48 px colored over all the black lines. I created a new layer to fill in with colors and textures and moved the layer backwards as in the text. I selected the paint bucket tool and clicked in the shapes to fill the shapes with various colors. I found it useful to select large thumbnails for the color swatches because the default swatches were so small. I also had to enlarge the image several times so that I could fill in the small shapes without flooding the image with the color.

I had a lot of fun trying out different filters in the filter gallery. I selected the color shapes I wanted to use a filter on with the magic wand tool and the shift key. That seemed to work fine for this image. I used the stained glass texture for the peach color on Zac's "forehead". It actually looks like snakeskin to me. The yellow rectangle in the middle of the forehead was filled in with a darker yellow and then I used the hypno lines brush again with a lighter yellow for the swirly pattern. I also used the texturizer, crosshatch (eyes), and rough pastels filters on some other shapes. I used the plastic wrap filter for the "nose".

For the last image instead of choosing a color to paint over the black lines I picked Styles and loaded the photographic effects. There was one effect called blue tone w/ shadow that made the lines look three dimensional with a bluish shadow. I used the paint bucket tool to fill in all the shapes with a light yellow. I selected the colored fills layer and then created a pattern layer and made it part of a clipping mask (not quite sure what that means) by checking the Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask.

There were a lot of patterns to choose from but I eventually selected the gauze pattern. I choose Hard Light from the Layers palette and changed the opacity to 69%. That allowed the gauze pattern to show through the yellow colored fills layer.

The result was interesting. It looks like the lion sketch is made out of string and it is draped or tacked over a light yellow gauze canvas.