Photo from http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml

Hi Neve,

I first modified the exposure on the boat in the foreground and duplicated the Layer.

Did a Select All and then Copy of the picture. I created a new Channel and pasted the picture into it and used Levels to increase the contrast. This was further touched up with a bit of brushwork and Black and White paint. Finally this was loaded as a Selection.

Finally I used the Radial Blur in the Zoom setting via the Selection to partially affect the image.

Regards

Con

An unusual result there Con, well done!

Between school and university, I spent a year in Thailand.
Though I saw much more of Bangkok city streets than landscapes like this!

Thanks Neve, nice image to work on!

Rô

Once again, Ro, a real winner!

Patricia

I DO like that Ro :nod: Good enough to hang.

Ditto, what Neve and Patricia said, Rô!!

Thanks for all the nice words! :blush: You folks are too kind. :blush:

Funny thing is, when I started this one I wasn't at all "inspired", but then it just kept on getting more interesting.
Happened before with "boring" flower shots that suddenly came to life!

Which means - Don't pass anything up before trying!! ;)

Rô

Rô, you convinced me to give it a try!

Went for a soft, dreamy look. Used Crystallize and Distort->Ripple plus Hue/Sat to emphasize the blues and the contrast of the boat.

C.J. i love yours, though if you don't mind my two-cents, i think some of that yellow (of the boat) shimmering on the water (sunlight effect) would make it so much more spectacular, imho.

Cold and rainy in B.C. Wish I was there.

Cheers
Dave

Another idea for the boats.

Steve C.

Steve and Dave, beautiful work. Each one has a different textural feel. How did you do it?

Cathy :nod:

Very, very nice C.J. I almost missed it. What kind of texture background did you use?

Cathy :nod:

Thanks Cathy. And I also agree, the one of Dave's is a knockout!

I used Impressionist on a duped layer, then duped again and applied angled brush strokes. May have messed around a bit with layer blends, (usually do, don't know when to stop sometimes.) 8-)

Steve



Steve and Dave, beautiful work. Each one has a different textural feel. How did you do it?

Cathy :nod:

Thank you!!!

My son just came back from Thailand and I can't resist.

:nod:

Margaret

:lmao: :wavey:

Margaret -- you are breaking an important rule!! Actually TWO rules!! :aghast:

1. You must use an artistic technique to modify your image when you submit it in this forum. I have done that for you below so that it now meets the requirements, thus preventing Danny from having to give you a virtual drubbing. :dead:

2. It is very impolite to eat in front of your friends without offering them some of what you are eating. Now, you may NOT be guilty of this faux pas, since those 'things' in the pan may be more grasshoppers and you may be offering them to us, but I cannot see them well enough to be sure. No, don't bother clearing up that part of the photo -- I don't really want to see more chocolate coated grasshoppers... :rolleyes:

Thanks CJ, I wouldn't want a drubbing by Danny :devil:

I don't think they were chocolate covered, just deep fried!

I envy anyone spry enough to travel to that part of the world - his food pictures are intriguing, but he also got to see a lot of the countyside and it is awesome - of course some of the locals seemed to want to have their pictures taken frequently as well but I guess when you're a group of 20-somethings that is to be expected.

I'm just working some serious meds out of my system, so creativity eludes me presently so can't contribute anything to this thread so I'll leave you to it....

Margaret

Been away for a few days but wanted to say thanks to Cathy and Steve. Great renditions all around! I tend to stick with filters and actions and have yet to develop real painterly techniques like Roland and others. I play a lot with a Cartoon action as well as Mike Finn's pOpArTiSt action. There are a lot of steps in the actions and often I'll use just half the action to get different effects. I found that I was blowing out the left side of the boat with a lot of the effects I tried and ended up restarting from scratch.

BTW Elle, really like your effort, simple with strong edges.

Cheers
Dave

Interested in how you maniped this. That is if you don't mind sharing your technique. 8-)

It's very sharp, but with a smoothed look that I really like.

Steve



Cold and rainy in B.C. Wish I was there.

Cheers
Dave

Finally finding time to play with this myself...

:bigthmb: for BYRO.... nice work...
wanna share a technique? :o:

You people are just so dang gooooood!

I wanted to see if I could get a water color "look" without using artistic filters in Photoshop. First thing was a crop.

After making a quick mask of the foreground boat, I duplicated the original layer and applied a slight lens blur and some glass distortion to the background areas with an inverted mask applied to this layer.

Duplicated the original again and applied similar distortions to the boat. Added some yellow to the reflection too. At this point it was looking pretty good, but I wanted a "sponge" effect without using the sponge filter so... I made a new layer on top of the stack, rendered some black/white clouds, added some noise and a Distortion-->Wave and a gausian blur then set this layer to Overlay blend mode. It really added to the overall sky and water areas with a more "strokey" smudgy blending without actual brush strokes.

Added the frame with Extenis PhotoFrame.

Thanks for the challenge!

First, congratulations to all :thumbsup: :thumbsup: , this thread is turning into an art gallery.

.... nice work...wanna share a technique?
Hi there, restev, :bigthmb: :bigthmb: welcome to RetouchPRO.

The technique is becoming my standard - so I think it's time to change :wink: .

1) Photoshop - generally enhance the image (better contrast, colours etc.);
2) Painter - Cloned with a streaky oily brush;
3) Photoshop - high-pass, emboss and / or lighting effects to emphasize the brush strokes.

Rô

My Attempt

Ken

Great job everyone. What a pleasure to look at all of the beautiful interpretations. I thought I would give it a try.

I used Painter and started with a clone, added paper texture, added glass distortion, and then added more surface texture. Back to Photoshop and did some hue/sat adjustments. The tutorial for this heavy texture/impressionist look was in the Wow Painter IX book.

Cathy :)

Loveable stuff, everyone! :wavey: ... @Duv - Wooooooo! :nod:

at first, some lighting effects, to push the island more back and add feeling of sun on left, then bit of dodging/burning, increased contrast on front ship and mountain, and then a bit of simplifier on the mountain to make it even more rough-like...

cheers :rainbow:

JustChecking -- haven't seen you around in months -- so glad to see you're back with us!! Nice rendition -- I can FEEL the sun!

wasnt going to do this one, but got to wondering why there were no people in the boats or on the beach.....

Craig

edit: (wait for it ;) )

Love it, Craig... you have so much imagination! :-)

Love it, Craig... you have so much imagination! :-)


DITTO! from me, Craig. You have a great eye for just the right addition.

(I'm staying safe here in the desert, and not getting anywhere near that body of water!)

Great effect Craig. It's the "Jaws" feeling.

Cathy :bigthmb:

thank you, dee dee, cj, cathy :)

it needs about 40 more frames to smooth it out, but if i did that i'd have to cut the size down to a postage stamp.

i did find a faster way to do this one. i found an appropriate shark, made a selection of the part needed, took the thai beach pic and duplicated it about 22 times. then, starting at the 2nd layer, i added in the selection and moved to the next one, but with it turned off. so it's the active layer, but is turned off. this leaves showing the last addition so i can place the next one correctly. when all are done i then save the file as a .Paint Shop Pro file which saves all the layers. i used to make a new image out of each layer, so this is new.

i then start animation shop and simply load the .Paint Shop Pro file with all the layers intact into it and it creates the animation in order of the layers from bottom to top. that's part of the new part also. i was placing each frame by hand before. then i select all the new frames and change the timing to slow it down a bit. each frame is displayed for 16/100ths of a second. i then go back to the first frame and lengthen the time on that one as the introduction frame and to give it time between the last frame and the first when it loops.

some day i'll show you my tribute to marilyn monroe that i made during the 30 day trial of macromedia's flash prograrm. it's kind of rough around the edges and if i ever buy that program i'll redo it. it's also set to music, which i cant do with animation shop.

Craig

actually, there's no reason why i couldnt just post the link to this now. it's been on that server all this time. it shld work in firefox, mozilla and internet explorer. it's an .swf (macromedia shockwave) file, so it you dont have the plugin for your browser, you'll have to get that first...maybe.... not even sure if you need the plugin to play this or not. just try it.

bear in mind, this was a first attempt at macromedia's shockwave that i did during the 15 or 30 day trial, whatever it was. it's unpolished. all the fades and wipes and so on were constructed by hand, image by image, as i knew no other way at the time to do it.

at any rate, here: http://www.mizus.com/kraellin/ToMarilyn1-k-1t.swf

just hit the link and it will load and start playing....or shld.

so, this was my tribute to marilyn monroe :)

Craig

A true homage, felt a touch of "nostalgia" and made me sad to think about her struggles with life, oh well sorry. Great work Craig, it took a while to load but it worked fine and so did the background music.

Perhaps you know this site (http://powerbullet.com/info.html) if not it might interest you. :classic:

Regards - Martha :wavey:

After skipping this picture several times I finally gave it a try..
Here's the result..

Edit: Added another try..

thank you, martha :)

you're not going to believe this, but i downloaded powerbullet yesterday! i had gotten interested in re-doing the marilyn presentation but all i had to work with was windows movie maker ver 2. it's ok for very simple stuff, but i wanted to do more than it could do. so, i went on a search of various download sites. after checking out tucows.com and zdnet, i checked out downloads.com and found powerbullet! it was the only one i ended up downloading. i havent installed it yet, but the weekend is coming up!

have you tried this yourself and if so, what do you think of it?

Craig

http://casmaran.com/images/Thai%20Islands2.jpg


Cricket

martha,

well, i installed and tried out powerbullet. it's not what i need :( i can make pages and transitions and so on, but it has no timeline, so, i cant embed the music across lots of different image frames. i can only put the music in one frame and let that frame run. when that's over, you move to a new frame/page and i could then have another music piece, but the same music wont spread out across all frames/pages and play as the frames sequence.

oh well, it was worth a shot. the program may well be good for other things, but not quite what i need and want. i suppose i could try out Swish, which is sort of like what paint shop pro is to photoshop, only in the flash arena, but even that is $300 i dont have to spend right now for thiis.

ah well, i'll keep lookin and playin around. maybe movie maker has an upgrade.

thanks :)

Craig

This is part of my "familiarization tour" of Painter. Used the sketch filter and added texture then added a photo filter in Photoshop. Many great interpretations so far!
Margaret.

Sorry I could not find this thread and I forgot to subscribe so wasn't getting updates by e-mail either :(

I am sorry this "pseudo flash" program wasn't of help. I tried to use it but didn't quite have time to practice much and the little I knew of flash has gone (with the wind ? ;) ) Back on track I seem to remember that in that same site there were other flash-type applications but am not sure how useful they will be.

Again sorry you cannot find a suitable program to apply your skill in animations, you are so talented it's a shame really. If I see something promissing will PM you with a link. Or post the link in the appropriated thread and PM you, should you wish to try it. :classic:

Regards - Martha :wavey:

thanks martha :)

actually, i found a free one that might work. i just cant download it or install it. it's microsoft's new Photo Story 3. it looks like it would do a slideshow with music type thing. however, i spent about 3 hours on the phone with microsoft tech support saturday because when i tried to download the thing i kept getting error messages about not being able to validate my copy of windows. now, this is pretty silly since i had to register this machine and o/s with microsoft when i first got it. it's a windows xp machine and quite legal.

now, after about 2 hours on the phone i finally got it downloaded, but when i tried to install it, it still wanted authorization! lol. this was getting silly. after another hour of running around in circles and trying different methods, we determined that something was goofed with my machine. they had had trouble with others having this problem but had always been able to solve it. wouldnt you know, i'd be the one they couldnt solve.

now, i dont blame microsoft. this new verification check doesnt surprise me. MS has been under attack and pirates are eating them alive. and i think they actually wanted to do something for those who do use valid copies. but, a few months back i had a couple of really bad crashes and i know some things got wiped in the registry, including some parts of the o/s and i'm guessing that's what's messing up my verification.

ah well, it's getting about that time to upgrade to a new machine or at least clean this one up a bit. so, maybe i'll just wipe the drive and start over... or go buy a new machine :)

so, thank you for looking, and yes, if you do find something, let me know.

Craig

Some really good pictures here check them out.

Lets see if I can remember what I did.

Duped
Did noise reduction on dupe to smooth a little.
Passed through Impressionist #djroil24
Duped the dupe and blended to overlay
Put this dupe through Redfields Basrelief and faded opacity slightly.
Merged down sharpened
Added a texture though you may not see it here.
Added a solid colour layer between background and merged down layer.
Changed blend of merged down layer to hard light.
Adjusted hue and sat of the solid colour layer,
Used Shadow highlight on merged layer to darken slightly. (just an experiment that seemed to work)
And I think that was it.

Peter

PSCS Art History Brush

Ah, yes. I remember longtail boats like these churning up the murky waters of the Chao Phrya River in Bangkok, where I spent one of the best years of my life, thanks to Uncle Sam. Like Ro, I didn't get out of town much, sadly.

This was done in Photoshop and Twisted Brush.