Riddled Glass

For Sliders Sunday today, I thought I would have another go at the wobblies I took of the West window at St John’s College chapel in Cambridge. You’ve already seen one of these which rather amusingly made it into Explore the other day.

 

I’m posting two versions :

Strained Glass is the ‘proper’ edit, over-sharpened as usual to capture the textures created by the movement. On a good day you can see some saints lurking in the picture amidst the wobbles.

Riddled Glass is based on this for Sliders Sunday.

 

When I was messing about with the last image I noticed that inverting it was … interesting. So I thought this time I would mess about a bit with layers and blend modes (and reflections and everything else in the usual toybox). The trouble I found was that the image was quickly reduced to a blobby mess. Now I have long felt that the boundary between blobby messes and fine abstract modern art is a delicate one, but I clearly wasn’t in an art mood this weekend.

 

So plan B. Riddled Glass is quite a simple edit using a Box Blur adjustment. Both versions are made just using Affinity Photo (in this case for the iPaddle), and last time I checked the software offers a larger range of blur tools than Photoshop. Box blur is one of these.

 

Box blur creates the blocky look (there is a circular option too, a bit like bokeh) and it only remained to add a 3D effect. This was done using the lighting filter (also available in Photoshop) with a single white spotlight top left and then adding some texture in the filter options (using the underlying image as a source) to give an embossed look.

 

If you have the time and an appropriate device it's fun to look at this up close :)

 

Thanks for looking. I hope you enjoy the images. Happy Sliders Sunday and 100x :)

Done