Saturday, May 31, 2008

A little Orton exploration

Am getting a little bored just lying around. Although I'm getting better just don't have the energy or the mobility to go shooting. I did feel well enough to fire up photoshop and dig through some older images I liked and see what I could do with Orton.

One of my favorite flowers is the African Iris aka "Fort night Lily". Its a no nonsense, no effort, odd pruning out every couple of years and whatever water falls on it keeps it going. My kind of plant.

This image was shot early morning for the longer shadows. It was framed so that the bulk of the plant was in the shadows with only the blossom in the light itself.

I discovered a new Orton technique with photoshop that I decided to try in photoshop. Pretty simple and straight forward. I think I like the results a lot more than the other I found.

Open your file. Duplicate with a new layer and name it "sharp". Use the sharp filter and sharpen the layer. Use the adjust tab and adjust your saturation and color curves. I increased the saturation for this layer from "0" to "25" Change the blend type to "multiply". Merge down the layer.

Use the duplicate new layer and name it "blur". Go to the filter tab again and use the blur option, "gaussian blur". Adjust blur to desired level, for this image I opted for a blur level of "20". Next go to the adjust tab, chose brightness and adjust brightness upwards, for this one I used a "20". Change blend type to "multiply" and adjust the opacity which I used at 75%.

Merge down the final image and save as a jpeg with maximum sharpness (IE minimal compression).

The steps aren't hard, a little time consuming but when you can find a tutorial out there it is pretty easy. In the end I like this a lot more than the original image, then again I like the romantic impressionist view of the world.

Enjoy, now for a hot tub and an ice pack as I've had enough up time for one day.

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