From Pop Art to Porcelain: Exploring Artistic Effects

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Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

 

Line Art from a Photo

This provided a number of methods and offered a lot of opportunity for investigation and research — in short, PLAYTIME. I selected a photo to work with which may have too much detail, but I wanted to see if any of the methods could produce interesting results with all the stuff in them. Here's the basic photo.

Smart Blur Technique

Yes, we're working through these in presentation order. To the right, we see the basic Smart Blur technique applied with settings of Radius: 49.5, Threshold: 65.3, Quality: High and Mode: Edge Only. Then the result was inverted.

It was interesting but not fascinating. I wondered what it would look like if I let the photo show through. So I duplicated the layer, selected and deleted the white, then hid the layers between the new blackline layer and the photo. The results, again, were interesting but not fascinating. I had to add a stroke to the edge, because when the cell on the webpage expanded, there was no end to the picture.

It looked kind of like the watercolor edge I was trying for in an earlier lesson, so I went down to the photo, duplicated it and blurred it with Gaussian blur 2.3. That obliterated the train. Aha! this is a job of Layer Mask Man! On the duplicated photo layer, I applied a layer mask (with my new pen) and blurred everything else.

Below is the result:

Find Edges

 At right is the Stylize > Find Edges technique with a Threshold of 189. I think that it's a result of having too much detail in the photo, but this technique either removed too much or left too much. The posted picture, in my opinion, leaves too much.

High-Pass Filter

This is the result of using the High-Pass filter at 4.8 and the Threshold adjustment layer at 145.

I'm not thrilled with the "scratchboard" effect and tried to invert the Threshold adjustment layer and the High-Pass filter layer. Neither gave me black on white, or anything remotely interesting.

 

Hard Mix

I did something wrong with this technique, I think. I sharpened the colors nad made a Merge Visibles layer. The made a copy of that layer and changed the blend mode to Hard Mix. I then did the Invert. Here is where things got strange. Janee sez "The results of tis won't be immediately obvious." To me the result was striking, everything turned black and purple. Somewhere I've missed a step, but I've gone back twice and cannot find the problem.

In any case, I carried on, did the blur (but didn't record the value, as I figured — maybe wrongly — that this is going to be image dependent), did the Threshold layer adjustment layer and got the result at right. Which I like. It's just spooky enough to appeal to me.

Final

Of the four method, I think I like the Smart Blur the best, although I'm certainly going to keep the others in my "kit bag" to try out on the occasions when Smart Blur doesn't do the trick. I also discovered that I'm not really a fan of plain old line art, so I played around a bit. Below are the results.

Original

As Line Art

 With Original and Layers Level merged visible and placed beneath the line drawing, and the line drawing blend mode set at:

Luminosity

Hard Mix

Pen and Inked Watercolor Effect

When I started this portion of the lesson, I was surprised to find that I had already done something like it above, under the Smart Blur portion. Nonetheless, I carried. I pulled up the watercolor picture from lesson 3 (below) and applied the pen-and-inked method as described in the lesson. I applied to Layer Mask as described in step 3, but didn't see any difference. I'm obviously still working on this layer mask business. I do like the painting better with the pen and inked effect.

Poster Effect

Two-Color

Alright, I may have cheated here by selecting a photo which is nearly two-color to begin with. I'll probably do something else for the posterized effect. Also, when working on this one I got so frustrated with the pen that I went back to the mouse. But more on that later.

I have had almost no experience with the Burn or Dodge tools before, so this provided a good learning experience for that (once I went back and read the directions to use it on the duplicate image layer, not the threshold adjustment layer).

After I had picked a color with the colorization adjustment layer (I used some called the Solid Color adjustment layer, because I could not find a Color Fill adjustment layer, but I think this is just a version vocabulary difference), I learned that I could alter the color after having applied my first choice and changed the blend mode. The first choice was much too dark for the kind of ethereal effect I was seeking.

When I was done coloring, I realized that the photo could do with a bit of cropping. The right one-fifth of the photo was now almost entirely light greeen, which added nothing to the effect at all. Out it went.

OK, time for pen lesson. The original photo had a telephone/power line running between me and the lake. I wanted to clone tool it out and thought that this kind of fine work would be excellent practice with the pen tool. However, when I went to select my source point (by holding down the Option/Alt key), as soon as I got near enough to the pad, the Brush selection palette popped up. Finally, I got my source point picked. But then while I was trying to clone, every time I moved more than two or three pixels, up popped the Brush selection palette again. After about 15 times of pressing Esc to get back to the work at hand, I gave up and went back to the mouse. Any suggestions, anyone?

 

Posterized

 For this exercise, I was poking around the works of one of my favorite photo-of-the-day photographers, Aman Geld, whose works can be found here. If you enjoy photography which captures textures and patterns, this link is a keeper.

Original

Posterized - 3 Colors

This reduced the number of colors, but I don't understand how Photoshop chose yellow, red and battleship grey as the colors to use. I didn't care for the grey and began to look for a way to eliminate it. I found it in a Brightness-Contrast adjustment layer.

Brightness-Contrast 0,100

In playing with the adjustment layer, I found that not very much happened on the contrast end until I hit the extreme. I also found that for this work if I lowered the Brightness below 0, the entire thing went completely black.

Cutout

 This time I went looking for an image with a lot of color and contrast, as recommended by the goddess. I found one at the photo-blog of mtl. Another site worth a visit.

Original

Ah, Paris in the dusk.

Hue-Saturation

As suggested I boosted the Saturation, almost to the sarcastic level — 73 — but didn't touch the hue or contrast.

Cutout

I'm not really sure what the Cutout filter does, so sooner or later I'm going to have to do some reading, either in the Help files or finding some online source which will provide more complete definition. Nonetheless, I played for a while and came up with this highly stylized result with values of 8, 5, and 1.

I rather like it.

Dithered - Indexed Color

 Oh! I do like this method. There are a lot of ways in which I can get in an apply rules when changing the color palette, especially with such a reduced color set. Once again, I began with a photo of Paris from mtl, referenced above. This is an evening shot of, I believe, Notre Dame, but from an angle you rarely get to see.

Original

The river. That cathedral. Those lights.

Indexed Color

I selected four colors and allowed the computer to decide which four to choose for the original palette. Then I chose Custom and here is where the fun began.

When you click one of the color squares, you get the color picker. I usually don't pay attention to anything but the RGB color model, but for this one I decided I would play with the HSB model, specifically the saturation (S) portion. The rule I used to determine what to pick was this: If the saturation is less than 50%, double it; if the saturation is greater than 50%, halve it; if the saturation is equal to 50%, leave it.

There will be many rules developed and tested, using a number of color models. This will, no doubt, eat up a couple of chilly Fall evenings and more than a few megabytes of pixels as I explore this new application of algorithmic alterations! Very cool.

For my next choice, I chose the Diffusion dithering effect, because I thought it looked best. Then I played with the percentages and decided that 100% gave a grainy effect that I liked.

Pop Art

Still wandering around the web, looking for good photos to use for various parts of this exercise. This is from Cagan Sekercioglu's Galapagos photo site.

Below we find, from left, the various stages.

I used the new pen to do the coloring and found what was giving me the problem mentioned earlier. I have what's known as a Scivener's Callous on my right middle finger. Just on the inside of the last knuckle, there's this lump, right where the pen or pencil rests when I'm writing or editing. It pressing on the button in the pen, which caused the brush selection pallette to display. The solution? Rotate the pen. Problem goes away. You have two choices of responses here:

a) Onslow — Nice!

b) Homer — D'oh!
   

Porcelain Effect

What we have here was a photograph of a wench from the Renaissance Faire in Sterling, N.Y. The subject, by the way, introduced herself in that fashion and insisted on being addressed by that word. We chatted for awhile and, when we parted, she said, "If I can get you anything, yell out 'Hey, wench!' If I'm in hearing distance, I'll come fetching." I'd say she's pretty fetching in any case. What a great smile.

Anyway, back to business.

I followed the directions studiously right, right up through the last step. And then, of course, I had to do something different, so I added a Color layer in Screen mode. It's just George being George.