Creative Interpretations: Cottonwood on the Bosque

[SWEngineer]

My wife took this picture in late fall as a model for a "family tree" CD cover. My job, of course, was to make the cover. I found this tree a fascinating subject and have tinkered with it almost endlessly since. Hope my friends here at RP like it too. Sorry for the lack of how-to on these images. (I like them both a lot. It's tragic that I don't know how to recreate them. ) I'll post more later that I did better documenting if there's interest.

Attachments
1) Original
2) Extracted the tree and gave it a new home (gradient sky, brushwork in Elements for the patch of grass). Got the rest of the way using PaintEngine somehow. Maybe some filters / adjustments in Elements as well.
3) Started w/ 2 and did something(s?) w/ Impressionist (or was #2 Impressionist & #3 PaintEngine??? Argh!)

[Janet Petty]

That is a wonderful tree. You'll have every genealogist in RP clamoring for it, including me.

Janet

[kiska]

I basically followed TPaul's tut on Dragan effect, http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/sho...ghlight=dragan.
I then aded aniso with a mask.

[philbach]

Very interesting and unusual treatment of the tree. What I expected would be a high contrast, sharpened rendering of the tree against a high contrast background.

The softening of the limbs and branches is different. Nice

[kiska]

Why, thank you Phil.

[Neve]

PaintShopPro8.1

Dupe original layer
L2 - Buzz Simplifier - Dupe L2
L3 - Negative - Mode/Color (L) - 80%
Dupe Bottom Layer and Place over L3
L4 - Mode Luminance(L) 52%
Merge all layers
Buzz Again
Aim/USM
Xero Filter/Bad Dream

[Con Looymans]

Hi SW,

I cut out your tree and put it on a seperate Layer to make things a bit easier.

I then used a Radial Blur filter followed by a Twirl filter on the Background Layer.

Regards

Con

[Con Looymans]

Hi SW,

I got all carried away with your tree. As I still had it in seperate Layers I ran a Chrome filter over it just for something different.

Regards

Con

[Con Looymans]

Hi SW,

I created a "Sphere" in front of the tree and addeda rose.

Hope you like it.

Regards

Con

[SWEngineer]

Kiska, I'm not a big fan of the dragan look on people, but dragan trees are terrific, esp. anios'ed.

Neve, gorgeous result. It looks like a rare dawn when a thick coat of frost covers everything. I love this one.

Con, looks like you caught my tree bug. Maybe not as addicting as a kalidascope, but still hard to leave alone. I especially like the chrome tree.

Here's another couple from me:
1st: A couple passes of graphic pen (different directions.) Copy this to a new layer. Slight Gaussian blur, set to muliply and merge back down with the first copy. Run the GBlur again.

2nd: DiffuseGlow. DryBrush. 2 passes of RoughPastels on a texture called 'obsidian'. Added a texturizer layer on top. (more obsidian).

-Mark

[Janet Petty]

Since this thread seems to be sliding toward the surreal, I thought I nudge it along some.

Enjoy,

Janet

[TylerRB]

Levels, Curves, a few Adjustment layers..... the usual me!

T

[CJ Swartz]

You've all motivated me to tiptoe into the surreal with you... or, at least the dark.

Adjustment layers, curves, color ranges - grow, similar; hue/sat; sharpen/aniso, distort-crystallize, textured...

[jaykita]

Beautiful image.
Glowing edges, invert, desat, conte crayon, overlay blend, levels, selective color adj ++

[DannyRaphael]

Well done, gang! Some very creative interpretations on this one -- real and surreal.

- - - - -

I thought it was especially convenient that the background sky colors were so distinct from the rest of the image. Using the Magic Wand tool (Tolerance = 24) it was easy to create a selection for the sky, which I saved as "sky" via Select > Save selection... . Then a Select > Inverse captured the tree and rest of the foreground. Using the "sky" and "everything else" selections enabled me to isolate the arty effects to the desired areas.

I started by applying Impressionist > Crayon > Short choppy strokes to the sky. This effect 'chops up' solid color areas. Then a dose of Impressionist > #djr Smudge Paint > 1D (followed by Edit > Fade and lowering the Opacity setting to back it off a little) followed by Photoshop Dry Brush (Edit > Fade) completed the sky.

The non-sky areas were done the same way, except no "choppy strokes." At this point I thought the foreground strokes looked "too detailed."

To compensate for that the background was duplicated and that layer moved to the top of the layer stack. Impressionist > #djr Smudge Paint > 2M (faded) followed by Photoshop Dry Brush (faded) were applied. After adding a hide all layer mask, the bottom of the layer was revealed by airbrushing white onto the layer mask.

If I wasn't so tired, I would open this in Painter for some brush strokes, but we'll have to live with it as is tonight.

Thanks, Mark. Great pic to work with.

~Danny~