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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...
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Making of - STILLNESS & use of curves to colorize a picture

Hello,

here I am with  another making of. I used an old foggy landscape to test some textures from the new texture pack to get an idea of their usefullness. I hope I can show how one can use a variety of textures while keeping the essential mood of a picture or even enhancing it.

As usual the before/after:


   

 I wanted to keep the moody hazy feeling of this shot, so I needed subtle textures.


Layers in PS




I chose 4 textures from the new Autumn Haze Pack, that were subtle enough, so that they won't overpower the overall impression of the image. Rose Mist was perfect, because it enhanced the grass red tones and made them glow. I think it is always worth while to seek out elements in a texture, that correspond with elements of the picture you work on.
I liked Never Ending Tale's subtle structure  and the two other textures I selected added great orange/yellow tones.
Although I took 4 textures and opted for more or  less strong opacity settings they in the end didn't dominate the photo. 

Still, I Thought adding more light to the foreground by applying a gradient (from white to transparent) with a setting of 60% Overlay which further enhaced the red tones and brought back the darker reds.

Tinting the dark tones

I wanted to add some blue hues in the dark areas of the picture. I know that there are several ways to do this. I opted for a curves layer - in this case the blue channel.


The only thing I did was dragging the end of the blue straight line a bit upwards - this way one only the dark hues turn bluish. BTW if you drag the upper end of the line a bit down you tint the lights yellow. This wasn't necessary because I was satisfied with the warm yellow tones that the textures added

Thanks for reading!!


Be creative,
Dirk




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