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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 Aimless Wanderer & creating a MATTE look

Hi,
today I wanted to show you a technique that helps to enhance the moodiness of a image. With the help of Lightroom's gradient tool or/and Photoshop's curves tool you can clip the shadows to achieve a matte effect.

Images that were treated this way also work well with textures.

Please move mouse over the picture for a Before/After look!


   


Working in Lightroom


After the playing around for a while the gradient curve looked somehow weird, but the the shadows looked faded & pale:



The important part you can see on the bottom left. I dragged the curve up, thus making the dark parts paler. I also used the sliders as you can see in the second screenshot to get the mood I wanted.



Here is a Before/ After view of the processed image:


The shadows in the right part of the picture are lighter & more pale/matte. It also seems to add more fog/haze to the overall image.

Working in Photoshop


Apart from some manipulations I wanted to show how I further texturized the picture as well as added even more mood by using a color gradient and the curves tool.



I only used subtle textures, Baltic Sands from the Vintage-Film-Photography-Pack and

Both have a frame and are based on old tintype / glass plates.

The impression of the colorful rising sun was achieved by using a color gradient. 

You'll find a bunch of my gradients over here: 30-fine-art-retro-color-PS-gradients
The one I used is part of this collection.

The textures and the gradient led to darker tones and stronger contrasts and made it necessary to once again work on the matte effect.

The technique is the same as in Lightroom - you simply drag the curve up a bit and the shadows become paler...



Thanks again for your interest and be creative!!!

Have a nice weekend!
Dirk

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