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...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

The making of a texture & how I used it

Its autumn and I must admid I love the moods that light, fog and nature create in that season. I wanted to make a post about the creation of a texture and yesterday I found myself in a situation where I ended up altering a texture for a shot I took on a foggy morning last November.



It is a photo of an meanwhile dead hawthorne tree full of red berries.  Of course, the original file wasn't that colourful and I wanted to give a real warm autumn feel to it. So I made my first corrections in Lightroom enhancing the red of the berries and using the colouring tool to give it a yellow tint:


Lightroom export

I also felt that the foggy parts on the pic's left side lacked interest, so I searched my archives for a suitable texture but couldn't find one that I was completely satisfied with.

I chose a texture I started to make some time ago and made some adjustments & alterations to get the one I finally used. I originally started with the folllowing picture:


original

Of course, I wanted the texture to be much finer so I decided to make a copy of the background layer and rotated it by 180° and got this:


Two layers, 2nd rotated 180°

Now I had a much finer pattern. I decided to add two layers of brush strokes to make the picture lighter and add some more structure to it.

Brush strokes

I copied this layer and set the first layer at 80% opacity / 100% fill - soft light, the second layer settings were 20% opacity / 100 % fill - hard light resulting in this:


First version of texture

I found the greenish leaves & branches  in the upper right  and the down left corners disturbing so I used Photoshop's patch tool to soften them. I also adjusted the colours and enhanced the red and yellow tones. I also added a dark red border and was finally satisfied with my new texture:


Autumn Leaves Texture

This texture will be part of a new texture pack I am working on, but you can download a higher resolution version from my Deviant Art account here: 
Download Autumn leaves texture

I'd love to see what you used it for. If you are a flickr member you can submit your work to my group

Thanks for reading!





Labels:

Comments

  1. Dylan@6615:09

    very interesting article, thks Dyrk

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown16:52

    This is excellent! Thanks so much -- I look forward to following your blog. Love your work. I wanted to download this gorgeous new texture -- for some reason, I couldn't get the "download' button to work. Will try again later.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tim16:54

    Nice article, thanks very much! I love the finished work, too - it reminds me a bit of an Arthur Rackham painting :^)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous17:46

    I really appreciate your generosity in sharing your process, Dyrk. This is such a beautiful texture and I can't wait to try it out. I will look forward to your posts here.
    -Cindy

    ReplyDelete
  5. Vicki18:06

    So happy to see you have a blog! Thanks for posting this beautiful image and especially for explaining your technique. I look forward to more!!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sharon (30yrs later)07:34

    I have never seen such a great post on making a texture. This is fabulous! I did try to download it as I would love to use it, but could not figure out how to download it from the web album. I look forward to exploring your texture set! Again, my compliments.

    ReplyDelete
  7. wuestenhagenimagery10:47

    Thanks very much for your comments!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment