Skip to main content

Featured

How To Create Minimalistic Landscapes Using Blur Filters in Photoshop

 For at least 10 - 15 years I love creating abstract minimalistic landscapes such as beach and forest scenes in my post processing of photos using a range of Photoshop's blur filters.  Here's one of my latest images that features this (and other) techniques: The original photo was taken almost 15 years ago with a 7 megapixel Canon Camera, but I wanted to challenge myself and try to make more interesting image out of it.  Start I came across this image while browsing through my photo archive and kind of liked the scene with the woman enjoying standing in or close to the surf. Editing Steps 1. I expanded the image from its 4:3 ratio to a square format making the added part transparent. Then I selected the blue sky and erased it. As I knew I wanted to create an abstract image I searched for a cloudy sky and found a suitable photo in my library, that would make a more interesting sky than a bland blue one.   I positioned this sky a layer under the beach photo and go...

Adding mood & fog with textures

Hello,
today a short post on how I sometimes enhance and intensify an already misty scenery and how I added/ enhanced the picture's atmosphere.
Using textures is again a very simple way to achieve this.

Here's the final result:

Stranger in the Fog


And this is the picture I started with:


Original SOOC


I used two textures from my latest pack. One is a mixture of a cloudy sky and a wall, the other one has a green wood structure:

  
Overcast

Green Bench


And here's how I used them in Photoshop:




Though the graphic suggests something different, I first added the cloud layer and was immediately satisfied with the result, because the fog became much more intense.
I wanted the whole picture to be a bit more spooky, so I decided to add a green texture. I also wanted to lessen the contrast between the green grass and the soft foggy part of the image.
The first green texture layer added structure to the picture, but did not so much with regards to the fog's colour, which appeared to be still very white. So I copied the layer and turned the blending mode to "Darken" which satisfied me, because the fog became a cool green glow. Unfortunately there was too much of the structure now. The solution was to blur this layer using Gaussian blur at 50% and I was close to my desired outcome.

Minor additions were:

- darkening the edges of the picture with a curves layer
- lighten up the fog by adjusting the levels
- finally I wanted to have a lighter green, which I achieved by extracting black out of the yellow          colour  with a Selective colour adjustment layer.

Now I had the picture that gave a quite good recollection of the mood I encountered on that early September morning at the river.

Thanks for reading!


Comments

  1. Anonymous14:28

    Thanks so much for sharing your recipe! The outcome is truely remarkable!! Beautiful work, Dirk! ~Kcam12

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment