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I took a lot of photos of my tomato plants, and after awhile got a little bored with simply correcting them, so that they were as perfect a photo as they could be. Here is a shot originally taken in RAW format, then processed in the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in, so that the color was correct and the highlights from the flash weren't too blown out. OK, it proves I was getting a lot of nice Roma tomatoes, but considered as a photo, rather than a piece of documentary gardening history, it isn't particularly interesting. That's where filters and layers and blending modes come in: using these tools you can make something visually rather dull into something rather more interesting. Below are two different combinations of this process. The one on the left was fairly complex, the one on the right rather less so. I think the one on the left would be OK as a stand-alone image, the paler one would make a nice illustration for something like a page having a recipe for homemade spaghetti sauce. WARNING: Once you start playing with filters, layers and blending modes you can waste enormous amounts of time trying out different things! |
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Some years ago I was in Italy with a group of English university architecture students, said group was led by two of their professors, one of whom was a renowned architect, as well as being a rather good watercolorist. The students and the watercolorist would all do drawings of the famous buildings, and amazingly good drawings, sketches and water colors they were. As a fine arts student, whose strongest skill was was in drawing and print making, I also did some sketching. And while some of the architecture students (and the watercolorist) claimed my sketches and approach were different, unusual, and interesting, I must confess to a certain amount of jealousy. So here I've used some Elements filters, layering, and special blend modes to convert one of my photos into the sorts of things they were all able to do, and I wasn't. Below left is the photo of the Duomo in Florence converted into a kind of pen and ink sketch, with a hint of color, on the right it has been changed into a watercolor. |
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Never one to leave well enough alone, I experimented to see just how many fine art renderings I could fake in Elements. To the left is a kind of demented hyperrealist look. Hyperrealism was an art movement that started in the early 1970s, and was quite the thing when I was studying art in the 1980s, I saw a fair number of shows featuring such work. I always thought the pieces more than a little strange, so that's what I tried to get here. The last two versions are more radical: a sedate pencil sketch, whose chief shortcoming is that there's no smearing--my acutal pencil sketches of things always got smears and smudges and thumbprints on them; and casting the whole thing as a miniature bronze. Finally, I gathered 12 of the variants together in iPhoto and made a movie: The Duomo Transforms, with the music of Bach, played by Glenn Gould. The movie has no control bar for aesthetic reasons, and is 6.4MBs. If you have a reasonably fast broadband it should play after a few seconds. I also put together a slide show, using the version of Bridge that ships with Elements, featuring 15 large size versions of different variations. |
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 A photo which turned out better than I had expected, so I processed it normally in the Elements editor: color correction, levels, crop and sharpen. |
 Later I realized it could look even better, if some visual clutter were removed. So I tidied up the wall, removing the placards and some spots. |
 Being a tourist and taking photos is fun. Unfortunately lots of other people are doing the same thing and get in your photos. |
 If you have the foresight to take several shots of the same place, with the tourists in different spots, you can fix this. |
 Sometimes the sky is just boring. |
 You can change it to something more interesting. |
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And here are some collages made using themes and the collage function available in Elements, plus something similar using a different method to the same the effect. This was something I had never tried before, and found it easy in some ways, a bit of a challenge in others. There are quite a few canned themes, and a number of different layouts, and you can do some customizing of sizes and arrangements. This could be useful if you want to make a digital scrapbook. The two directly above used the Photo Collage function, the one on the left started with a blank canvas and then I went to the Create tab, but did not select any project type at all. Instead, I added things as I saw fit and returned to Full Edit to fine tune my creation. I probably got carried away, but it was fun, and I actually found it easier than using the canned layouts in the Projects. This would work great for making something like a poster, which is no doubt why I decided to save it as "Fall Poster." All of the pieces used, except the two photos, are available in Elements as backgrounds, frames, objects, and more. I showed some restraint didn't use absolutely everything available. Which of these methods works best may be a matter of taste or personality or experience. Those of us who want greater control would probably like the second method. Those who are unsure of their design skills may prefer to use layouts created by professionals. |
