Ah, a little color...
A couple weeks ago, while cooking Faith's birthday dinner, I noticed that the water being heated to cook peas had whirls and swirls from the sugar I had dissolved into it. Of course I took a picture.
Some photos aren't as interesting once you are looking at them on the computer screen. The patterns were there but were too subtle, especially after shrinking the image to web size.
Playing around with photoshop, trying different techniques to alter contrast and levels, I tried something else on a whim this morning. I made a copy of the photo layer and then blurred the top layer about 25 in gaussian blur. I then changed the blending option (popup which says "Normal") to Exclusion, leaving the opacity at 100%.
That provided the first hint of color and some detail popped out. After that it was just a matter of playing with levels to get the balance of color and light you see here.
2 comments
permanent link
email this
Good technique and great result. It is a beautiful "natural" abstract. The technique you used is very similar to what photoshop does when making a "unsharp mask" filter: the blurred version takes away the slow changing part in the image, leaving behind the faster changing "texture".
Thank you.
And thanks for the information regarding unsharp mask, I had no idea what was happening under the hood.