At some point on its way from the shutter click to a printing (or a web page) a photograph may cross the vague boundary space that separates "photograph" and "image". This is a discussion of "images" that started out as "photographs".
First, my personal attitude . . . . I only care with mild curiosity how an image was created, or what software was used, or what camera & lens was used to take a picture, or what brand of acrylic was used to make a painting, or what pen was used to write that note you just sent me. Mildly curious is all I am about stuff like that.
What I care about enormously (almost exclusively) is how the image affects me when I look at it.
With that behind us now, let me go on . . . .
This is a moderately tutorial page of how I get some interesting effects, in postprocessing "photographs" way over to the point that they are now "images". I hope to demonstrate a bunch of different processes as time goes by, but I make no promises on how fast this will happen ;))
There's a certain look that I sometimes like for an image. Hard to describe in words, so I will show it at the end of these steps to getting there.
This process (using the GIMP) goes as follows.
- Open an image file. This will be the "background" layer.
- Scale image to 800px wide (for example).
- Duplicate that layer. This is the "top" layer.
- Blur the top layer, using FILTERS>BLUR>SELECTIVE.GAUSSIAN.BLUR (I used 8px blur for this 800px image).
- Keep the top layer opacity at 100 (until you choose to experiment).
- Change the top layer "mode" to "multipy" or "burn" (experiment).
- Dial the top layer opacity back to 60% (again, experiment)
- Click on the names below to see the effects of each mode selection.
/ Original
/ Blurred
/ Multiply (60% Opacity)
/ Burn (60% Opacity)
