Back in the day, before freeways and air conditioned cars, both of these excursions would have taken 30-40 minutes driving on surface streets from the city into the ‘burbs. The ice cream shop was Higgins Ice Cream in Waltham, and the flying horses was my name for the merry-go-round at Revere Beach. True, dad’s Dodge pickup truck didn’t have air conditioning in the cab, but for us kids that got to sit in the open air truck bed, it was pretty cool.

Fast forward some fifty years, to the time I was living in Carlisle PA, freeways and air conditioned cars made it a relatively easy jaunt to visit the various New Jersey and Maryland coastal resort towns. Visiting the boardwalk amusement parks became the inspiration for this series of portraits of merry-go-round steeds.

The post Flying Horses first appeared on Pasqua's Pixels.

Every now and then I’ll make another run at trying to recreate the translucent colors and free flowing shapes of a water color painting. This year I focused my efforts on the collection I’m calling Rock and Sky, combining scenes from Arizona, Colorado, and Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park.

Sections of some of the images in this collection start to approach my vision. The challenges I still need to overcome are my tendency to include too much detail, too much digital paint (not enough white space), and colors that aren’t translucent enough. For example, in the image included with this post, I like what’s happening with the clouds, but I not really happy with the sky overall. Likewise, the mountains and rock formations have too much structure and detail, as does the foreground. Although I like the overall image, it didn’t really achieve the goal of looking like a water color.

Every time I try, I learn a little more, although at times it seems like one step forward and two back. No doubt I’ll try again next year. I already have some ideas for new methods that might bring me closer to my goal.

The post Rock and Sky first appeared on Pasqua's Pixels.

When a filter is applied to an image, by moving a few sliders on the filter’s control panel the image will take on a new appearance. In my experience, I get better results when I apply a filter multiple times, using different settings each time, and then blend the results together. This technique involves using layers and layer masks. The image below shows the 16 layers that went into producing the features image at the top of this post.

In the finished image I want the building to stand out, and the grass foreground and forest background to be less prominent. With the Desaturate layer I lighten and reduce the saturation of these areas of the image.

Up to this point my image is still in color. The Merge 2 layer consolidates all the layers below. Before applying the sketch filters I want to make sure that the image is converted the black and white, so no tell-tale hint of color will come through in the sketch. Photoshop has a nice adjustment layer for doing just that, which is what the B&W Layer is.

As I said earlier in the post I like to apply the same filter multiple times, with different settings, and then blend the results together.  Doing this helps me render parts of the image with more and less detail, and it also addresses the fact that one filter setting may not show all parts of the image as good as I would like. The three Sketch Filters are layers where the sketch filter has been applied with different settings to the B&W Layer. Using layer masks I’m able to bring through just the portions of the image that I want into the final product.

Even the sketch filter that I was using needed a little something more around the edges of my main subject, the building and fence. So I applied an Outline Filter from a different family of Topaz filters to get the effect I wanted. An outline filter is in some ways similar to a sketch filter.  Also known as an “edge filter” the action performed by this filter is to find all the edges (places where the color or contrast change is abrupt) and replace those edges with a black line, leaving the rest of the image blank.

Almost there! The Merge 3 layer is another consolidation layer, capturing all the visible layers below, and the final layer I’ve called my Edge Effect layer.  This final layer is a layer filled with white which I then hide with a layer mask. Using a textured brush around the edges of the layer mask I reveal the edges of the white layer in the finished image. This prevents the pencil lines from extending all the way to the edge of the image, a small touch that I think gives the end product a more hand drawn effect.

Phew!  Once again I tip my hat to those people who can take a pencil, paper, and their imagination, to create beautiful hand drawn pencil sketches.

The post Pencil Sketches first appeared on Pasqua's Pixels.

Usually when I work on an image I’m thinking about filling the screen, edge to edge, with shapes and color from the original scene captured in the camera. This collection contains several examples where I deliberately omitted parts of the background, which I think have helped sharpen the focus of the image.

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The featured image for this post shows what the structure lines for this image look like before being applied. To create the lines I made a copy of the original photograph (the version that does not have any of my brushwork or color enhancements), and applied an edge sensing filter to the copy. An edge sensing filter acts like a piece of tracing paper covering the image, where some invisible hand has gone through and traced over the edges that are present in the image. The invisible hand in this case is the edge sensing filter software and the settings I make when applying the filter determine what the software will interpret as an edge. Moving the slider up and down on the image below will show the effect of the filter on this image with the settings I selected.

After creating the structure lines, the next step is to apply them to the image.  I begin by opening the image file that contains all of my brushwork and color enhancements. Then, I make a copy of the image with the structure lines and paste it on top of the brushwork/enhanced image. My Layers tab will now appear as shown on the right. At first, all that I see is the structure lines. I need to do something that will make the white background of this new layer disappear, leaving behind the black structure lines.

To accomplish this I will change the blending mode of the layer with the structure lines. The blending mode controls how each layer interacts with the layers below it. The default mode of every new layer is set to Normal. Using the drop down menu, I change the blending mode to Multiply. Multiply mode causes the white portion of the layer to disappear, leaving behind my structure lines. In the image below, the top part shows what happens when the blending mode is set to Multiply, and the bottom part shows what the image looks like when the mode is still set to Normal. 

Usually I will lower the Opacity setting of the layer with structure lines to somewhere between 20% to 30%. This gives the lines a more subtle impact on the final image. I might also decide to completely hide some of the structure lines by applying a layer mask onto the layer with the structure lines. But layer masks will be the topic of another post.

The post Structure Lines first appeared on Pasqua's Pixels.

Well “someday” came recently resulting in the portfolio I have simply called Trees. 

My first attempt working on these images resulted that had too much orange, so I needed to do something that would create separation between the subject of each image and the surrounding landscape. I experimented with blackening the soil on a couple of the images.  Perhaps because it was around Halloween when I worked on these images I decided to carry this effect throughout the collection.

The black soil was produced by creating a layer where the red and yellow channels were desaturated and darkened, then applying a layer mask that hid most of this new layer except for the soil area.

The post Trees first appeared on Pasqua's Pixels.

Lightroom/Crop & Adjust

After returning from a shoot I transfer the images from the camera onto my computer using a program called Lightroom. Lightroom helps me catalog and adjust the appearance of the images. Looking through the camera’s viewfinder at this scene, what I saw was the white boat decked out with some colorful gear, and its reflection on the water. Looking at the image on my monitor back home, I saw all the distracting objects surrounding the boat. Using Lightroom I cropped the image from rectangular to square, to get rid of some of the distracting elements, and adjusted the color and contrast of the image.

Photoshop/Topaz Lab Filters

After using Lightroom, I opened the image with Photoshop where I tweaked the colors some more and took the first of several steps to make the boat stand out from its surroundings. Photoshop has a feature called Filters. Filters are predefined adjustments that can be applied to an image to alter its appearance. I use a set of filters made by a company called Topaz Labs that integrate seamlessly with Photoshop. These filters simplify the image by removing most of the details present in a photograph. Using the layers feature in Photoshop I can apply different filters to the same image, and by using layer masks I can control which parts of each layer will be visible in the final image. In the before/after comparison below, the after image (on the right) is starting to look more like a painting than a photograph, and the colors behind the boat have been muted to help the boat stand out.

Corel Painter/Wacom Tablet

I don’t always work on my images with the Corel Painter program, but I do whenever I am trying to achieve a real hand painted appearance. The Wacom tablet I have connected to my computer allows me to use a pen like stylus on a pressure sensitive tablet, in order to smear around the colors with a variety of brush sizes and styles. In fact, the Corel program also has a pretty good auto painting mode, that allows it to automatically apply brushstrokes for me. For this image I used Corel to create two versions of the image, one using big bold brush strokes, and the other using a smaller brush that brought out more detail on the boat. I used layers and layer masks to combine the two versions in a way that presented the boat in greater detail than the background and foreground parts of the image. 

Photoshop/Final Touches

Whether or not I have used Corel I will always apply some finishing touches in Photoshop. Usually this will include a final color adjustment and what I like to think of as the signature element of all my finished images. As you move the comparison slider back and forth across the image below, you will see what appear to be pencil thin lines in the final image. This is achieved by using another Topaz filter and layer masking. There are two reasons why I add this minor detail to all my images. First, I think the lines add structure, making it a little easier to interpret the image. The second reason is a bit more personal. If I could actually paint an image like this, especially using watercolors, I would start with a pencil sketch. The pencil lines wouldn’t be covered everywhere, especially under a thin coating of pigment. My finishing touch is a reveal of my secret desire to be able to draw and paint like a real artist!

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