Dahlia Diddles Set II
I was rather at a loss yesterday about what to do for Sliders Sunday this week. Wonderful ideas were notable for their absence. So I thought I would have a play with that good old favourite - a dahlia pic.
There are four endpoints in this set: two are fairly well-travelled approaches and two are sheer experiment.
The first is a fairly straight rendition of the image using the Radiance and Smudge filters of Topaz Studio. The radiance lengthens and strengthens the lines while smudge smoothes surfaces. The result lends a greater sense of physicality, particularly in the petals, that works well with flowers - a bit like an oil painting. The difficulty with this approach is getting the balance right - if you look at the image in detail you can see the filters are having a real party so you need to resist overdoing it. But what is right depends quite a lot on the device and scale that the image is seen at. In other words, you are doomed :(
You can play Spot the Fly with this one ;)
The second is a mirror version created entirely in Affinity Photo. I thought I’d got over my obsession with mirroring flowers, but apparently not. This one is made setting up the adjustment with five mirrors and then searching about a bit with the origin to find an interesting image. Most of the work was in getting rid of the background.
Symmetry in an image has a strange effect on our minds. It increases visual impact but reduces attention span. I call it the ‘wow!... boring’ effect. I still like creating symmetric flower images because it makes me look more closely at the flower and see things that I’d previously missed.
The last two I feel a bit apologetic about as they are not really finished pieces but proofs of concept. They are both made using an approach I stumbled across with my previous Sliders Sunday playtime, that of duplicating the image layer and then changing the blend mode of the top layer to Difference. That just creates a black screen (because there is no difference between the layers). The fun starts when you begin mangling the top layer.
Previously I’d just used Liquify to mangle the layer (this pushes pixels around without smudging). It’s easy to do in Affinity because the Liquify adjustment is just another layer that remains editable. But that was not enough here - having a predominantly white flower doesn’t work as well as the multicoloured one last time. So I dabbled in my diddling with Recolour, Smudge, Gradient Map and Liquify. The textured one is mainly Smudge, and the other is several Difference results together in a composite.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy some of them and that they encourage you to have a bit of fun yourself. I’d love to hear which is your favourite. I’ll post a link to the in-camera version in the first comment so that you can see where we started with this set.
Thanks for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday :)
Dahlia Diddles Set II
I was rather at a loss yesterday about what to do for Sliders Sunday this week. Wonderful ideas were notable for their absence. So I thought I would have a play with that good old favourite - a dahlia pic.
There are four endpoints in this set: two are fairly well-travelled approaches and two are sheer experiment.
The first is a fairly straight rendition of the image using the Radiance and Smudge filters of Topaz Studio. The radiance lengthens and strengthens the lines while smudge smoothes surfaces. The result lends a greater sense of physicality, particularly in the petals, that works well with flowers - a bit like an oil painting. The difficulty with this approach is getting the balance right - if you look at the image in detail you can see the filters are having a real party so you need to resist overdoing it. But what is right depends quite a lot on the device and scale that the image is seen at. In other words, you are doomed :(
You can play Spot the Fly with this one ;)
The second is a mirror version created entirely in Affinity Photo. I thought I’d got over my obsession with mirroring flowers, but apparently not. This one is made setting up the adjustment with five mirrors and then searching about a bit with the origin to find an interesting image. Most of the work was in getting rid of the background.
Symmetry in an image has a strange effect on our minds. It increases visual impact but reduces attention span. I call it the ‘wow!... boring’ effect. I still like creating symmetric flower images because it makes me look more closely at the flower and see things that I’d previously missed.
The last two I feel a bit apologetic about as they are not really finished pieces but proofs of concept. They are both made using an approach I stumbled across with my previous Sliders Sunday playtime, that of duplicating the image layer and then changing the blend mode of the top layer to Difference. That just creates a black screen (because there is no difference between the layers). The fun starts when you begin mangling the top layer.
Previously I’d just used Liquify to mangle the layer (this pushes pixels around without smudging). It’s easy to do in Affinity because the Liquify adjustment is just another layer that remains editable. But that was not enough here - having a predominantly white flower doesn’t work as well as the multicoloured one last time. So I dabbled in my diddling with Recolour, Smudge, Gradient Map and Liquify. The textured one is mainly Smudge, and the other is several Difference results together in a composite.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy some of them and that they encourage you to have a bit of fun yourself. I’d love to hear which is your favourite. I’ll post a link to the in-camera version in the first comment so that you can see where we started with this set.
Thanks for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday :)