DMIS10C, Lab 7

Lab #7 was somewhat interesting though I didn't learn much in this lab (besides the history of photography), given my experience with previous versions of Photoshop.

I mostly played with blur filters, noise filters, pixelate filters, brightness/contrast, and levels.
There are 7 layers that were used to create this image. I had actually intended to use some of the texture filters that I knew from the previous versions, but could not find them in the latest Photoshop. Perhaps some stuff was moved around, but either way, I ended up being able to pull off the intended effects without needing those filters.

Step by step:

1. I first desaturated and resized the original image.
2. I noticed that in the first-ever photograph, there are very few midtones between shadows and highlights, so I went ahead and increased the contrast (from the brightness/contrast dialog) and I played with the levels so that the darkest tones weren't too dark, and lightest tones weren't too light, and with very few midtones in between.
3. I used the crystallize filter to add a jagged edge to all of the shapes in the photograph, and then used Gaussian Blur to soften the now-jagged shapes.
4. I decided that the picture didn't look washed out enough, so I used the lasso tool around where the highlights should be washed out and filled in additional highlights. I did this four times, each time on a new layer. Each of these highlight shapes were also blurred in various ways so that they didn't have a hard shape, and then set to "Overlay" blending mode.
5. I noticed that there were a large number of bright speckles in the first-ever photograph's shadows, and a number of dark speckles in the highlights. I created one new layer for each of these, one for bright speckles and one for dark speckles. For each of these, I generated gaussian monochromatic noise, then crystallized with a size of 3 pixels, and then blur-more. Lastly, I went over each of these speckle layers with a very soft eraser brush to make it non-uniform. The bright speckles layer is set to lighten, whereas the dark speckles layer is set to darken.

Some possible improvements: I think the clouds in this turned out too clean, even though they were given the same treatment as everything else. Perhaps there needs to be more of a noisy dither on the clouds to make the result more convincing.

Here's the final result:

Larger Version

Some bizarre stuff that I've noticed: When uploading images to Blogspot, the images are actually compressed a lot. This means that the Blogspot version looks really different from the one that I consider to be my finished iteration!
I've included the "Larger Version" as a link to an alternative host that doesn't affect the quality of the image.


Source images used:
Swan Lake, Montana