i'm a real noob (and i don't mean just this board :grin: ), and i wanted to turn a photo into a "bright day effect" (you know, like when your eyes are used to dark, and you come up to the bright day - all's shiny and saturated)

all i did was playing w/ layer's blending modes and some blurring/sharpening... but i have a feeling there's something missing (or is superfluous?); i don't think it's the glow around the isle, as even w/o it it still looks "weird" to me... maybe colours? shadows? ...
any ideas (even those not directly to the topic :wink: ) are welcome


in accordance w/ the guidelines - i don't mind anyone changing/modifying the pic, and i'm looking 4ward to any comments; thanks


the first attached pic is (scaled down) original, the other one is wha i got...

I think that main thing that looks odd between the first and second image, is that the second image is very soft and looks out of focus. Furthermore, the blurring has resulted in the lost of a lot of detail.

Here is what I did:

1. Duplicated layer

2. Filter>Render>Lighting Effects Light Type: Omni. I widened the light circle until it covered the entire photo. Then adjust the levels to your desired output.

3. The results seemed a bit too overexposed for my tastes so I change the layers mode to soft light. You can experiment with hard light or vivid light, or even duplicating the layer and seeing just how bright you want to go.

4. For a final boost try adding a Curves adjustment.

5. Finally, I applied a very slight unsharp mask just to the island.

thanks T Paul!

gave it a try, and like it more... guess that what i didn't like were the trees that ended up darker in my first try...

about the blurring - i forgot to mention it, but it was also my intention (i really wanted it to look like when your eyes hurt from all the light, and almost like when you have tears in your eyes), so i used (after few colour changes) the upper layer as hard light, and blurred the lower one; i guess that the extra-blur (that mostly destroyed details) came from the downsampling (it's been done in irfanView, not any pro, so it added a lotsa blur)...

thanks once again! :happy:

Happy to help out. You'll have to post your final results so we can see how it turned out!

~T

i think i've got close to what i wanted to get... maybe some more playing necessary, but that won't be a question of layers any more :-D

i know it doesn't look any "good", maybe i should've specified more what exactly i wanted to achieve...

it seems a lot blurry again, but the original is 2048x1536 (just doesn't fit the 100K limit :masked: ), so the details i wanted to leave there, are still there, but not in this scaled-down version :wink:

i just duplicated background, used lighting effects, set blend to hard light (75% - 90% opacity works well), blurred the background w/ gauss (1.5p), and... that's about it :-)
way simplier than my former tech, and i really like how the trees came out, unlike in my first version...

thanks once again, T Paul! :wavey:

here's a scaled down final:

Of course, I guess it depends on how bright the day is and how much you are squinting. I was in the backyard looking at our grove of 130 foot Douglas Firs in very bright sunshine. Squinting in the bright light, I noticed that bands of striated light shoot up vertically. It also seems that when squinting, most everything is indeed very blurry. I'm not sure if it's what I like but I think it captures bright "squinty" light, at least for me.

Cheers
Dave

yeah, i also tried this idea, but didn't like it, as it seems like "just outta focus" or "shaking hand"... guess RGBE mode would be necessary for these pics and effects, as on the normal crt it just hasn't the effect of "the light hurts" (too narrow range of intensities)...

i made the bands of light in the direction if the light source, but it looks just like "floating"...

'nyways, thanks for the idea and comment!

I hear ya. Your last post is similar to another one I tried with a massive curves adjustment to blow out the highlights. I tried just using a small amount of motion blur set at 90 degrees.

Cheers
Dave

I tried to think of what this would look like had I just stepped out of a very dark cave. Like Dave, I used curves mainly to push the light volume up without losing all the color. I also used an unsharp mask at about 80/3/1 to achieve a bit more contrast.

IMHO, the theory of making it blurry would be lost on the viewer. What a very bright image does for me is start making me squint on my own, thus adding my own "blurriness" without the artist telling me how I should view it :)