Sometimes things just have to go

 

There are times when you can not avoid some obstructions the way of a clean composition, Usually it is best to walk around a little and it is surprising how easy it can be to avoid signs, lampposts etc. Other times it does seem to be impossible to avoid distracting objects in a good composition. You might avoid that sign but then a tree or parked car pops into frame.In such cases it is handy to have a context sensitive easer, (or alternatively a cloning tool). There is a really neat context toll in OnOne 10 Enhance called perfect Eraser. It works best if you just remove a few sections at a time, but it does and amazing job with a relatively few strokes. Photoshop has a similar tool and lightroom has a liner clone tool, similar to the spot removal tool and make need a few more corrections. The results can make a significant to your compositiom

ArtInspired :: More Inspiration from Fred Williams

One of my Fred William’s inspired experiments escaped into the wilds of Flickr a bit sooner than I was ready for (image on the right). It is based on a series of bracketed photos I took in the Deadman’s Gully park/wetlands behind Clifton Beach, just north of Cairns. I really liked the abstract patterns of the light and shade, particular as captured in a series of autoawesome HDR* images google had produced BUT whilst the shapes where amazing the colours where not realistic and somewhat hideous. I felt they did not convey “a true sense of the place”.

The problem of getting the colour right might not worry many but Fred Williams definitely did honestly represent the colour and texture of the Australian landscape. He also likely to being the process out in the landscape as a way to anchor his works with a true sense of the place. I actually don’t have a sketch to go with these images but I do have a couple of pages in my sketchbook that document all the water based media for sketch I had taken on my trip to north Queensland,. It wasn’t hard to scan this and use it on Corel Painter Essentials 4 (yes I haven’t updated yet!) to modify the palette of colours used in my strips. I then autopainted with a standard round watercolour brush to resample these images using my colour palette to give a more watercolour/gouache look. Much closer to what I remember of the place but still about the shapes and textures.

The final step was to place the strips over another HDR image from the set and now the images is working much better as a classic William’s painting that changes your sense of the place as space as you interact with the image. To do this display the Flickr image below full screen. Being by looking in detail close up and slowly step back still focussed on the image. You should soon reach the point where you feel you are there. Enjoying the shade and respite from the burning glare of the sun. Perhaps you are looking for your next meal, a large eel lurking in the pools, perhaps a fat mud crab hiding in the gnarled roots or perhaps you have an eye peeled for that crocodile looking for his dinner.

What is Clone Painting?

I have been a long time fan of Corel products. Corel Draw is still my go to graphics program and I use AfterShot Pro all the time now. I also have Corel Painter Essential 4 (it was bundled with my Wacom portable bamboo tablet) and Painter Lite (it was bundled with AfterShot pro). These latter two programs allow you to paint on layers over any photo and do some sampling from the image (such a colour and tone). Unlike other "artistic" filters that algorithmicly change the whole image, these works at the stroke level and the type of stroke you make leaves an authentic mark for the media and brush or pen you have selected. Well Corel have just release Painter Essentials 5, which is clearly aimed at the "art enthusiasts and emerging photo artists who want to go beyond ordinary and turn everyday inspiration into wildly impressive art". There is an autopaint setting (which can try its best to make marks suiting the media you choose). However this is really a fantastic product for anyone that wants to be creative and show their own originality (Specifically haven't already invested a lot of time and money learning the fancier side of Photoshop.)


So what is clone painting? other than a term invented by corel! It is the process of "painting" on a new layer (or layers) by sampling the underlying photo. pretty well any package that has a clone stamp and layers capabililty can do it (eg photoshop, gimp and even paint.net). At the simplest level you could say trace over the edges in your photo with a pencil (the analogy outlines on a sheet of tracing paper is good for this process). The you might change to a watercolour style brush and by again sampling the colour and tone from the photo below start to paint in the image (in a process somewhat like colouring in). Using a mouse to do this is possible but having a pen and tablet makes this all very natural and brings a lot of hand drawn authenticity into the resulting image.. The Corel Painter Series products have taken this to a high degree of sophistication by allowing automatically sampling the point under the brush at any time. Other packages may require that you dip your brush (or an eye dropper) into the photos to get the colour you want each time you need to change. Using a soft edge cloning tools some of the brush strokes may even copy the image below to the width of the brush being used and with a little feathering at the edge.

Clone Painted Self Portrait (via Corel Painter Lite)

Whilst some purist artists may look down on this process, there are very many younger artists that are running with this technique and producing beautiful and original work, Often they identify under the grouping digital artists (on a whole different level to those posting those "no longer zany" instagram filters).

Vive la différence !

PhotoProject :: How to Photograph Nothing

I just read an interesting article in The Artist Magazine by Paul Talbot-Greaves titled “How to paint nothing” (January 2014), in which he comments,

“Many people have said they probably wouldn’t notice the subject in one of my landscapes and would probably walk straight past the scene, … So just how do you notice a composition of nothing?”

There is a video of Paul painting a watercolour below (it is speed up but takes just over 10minutes, and is well worth watching to see how he uses a simple colour palette and strong tonal shapes, lines of the river, skyline and a few trees to quickly build a wonderful yet conventional landscape composition). Unfortunately a well meaning (and probably very experienced) photo critic would suggest his landscape needs a red canoe with the canoeist in a bright yellow life-vest positioned at the first bottom “thirds point of interest”, but he would be wrong it doesn’t need to be like that (ok it might be if you want to win the camera club photo of the month and he is judging!). It needs the artist eye to see the colour, composition and tone! That’s all.

I am inspired to apply his insights into the photographic process. One in particular is that  “compositional designs are best when strong lighting is involved”, for example using shadows to create exciting negative shapes and add dimension to an image. Paul also is attracted to “the bright, high chroma colours against darker muted tones”

So over the past couple of days I have been quick to pick up my camera whenever I see that strong light variation and strong colours against shadows, and particularly interesting shadow patterns. Did not really matter what the subject was after all it is a photo of nothing, I was just looking for the right lighting ambience, boldish colour and shadows.

This set of images (on the right) are simply of the shadows of a potted yucca plant on my partly open patio doors. I was sitting enjoy a coffee in the sun at the time. I had the foresight to include an EV bracketed set of exposure, so I sent that set off to Google+ Autobackup and this time they did return a decent *HDR autoawesome, but the composition, as shoot, was a bit boring. Also it had a few damaged leaves on the yucca and they were an unnecessary distraction. My favourite tool to fix composition in any photo is the crop tool, It is normally a simple logo of two opposing L shapes, occasional with a curved rotation arrow. Google+ photos has some good edit tools on-line and the crop tool (shown below) has a feature to control the ratio (aspect of horizontal & vertical axis) to keep the crop within given standard size combinations. There is a separate icon at the top of the panel on the right to do any rotational (straightening) adjustment.

I have not bothered about the rule of thirds of any other compositional rule, I was looking for a pleasing combination of colour and shadow and I like the contrast of the vertical door frames and the angled shadows with their lost and found lines feel. An image like this is a great place to experiment with all sort of crops, so don’t stop at your very first try. The wooden door handle on the white door frame is a little distracting but I have not managed to find any cloning tools in Google+ Photo so I have had to downloaded the edited image and then take it through OnOne’s Perfect Enhance 8. Perfect Enhance has a really magic Perfect Eraser which is content aware and does a both quick and reasonable job of removing the handle. Finally I add a big softy vignette.

So the exercise of photographing nothing can be rewarding, and encouraging both seeing more like a painter might but also forcing some creativity in you post processing (in this case perhaps a little more abstract albeit more thoughtful cropping).

PhotoProject :: Dipping a paint brush into a photo

I’m really not sure where I saw it described this way, perhaps it was an advert for a webinar or maybe a Corel or Wacom promotion, but I like the idea of being able to dip my paint brush into a photo and come up with something original. Not yet another corny “art” filter style process that produces a fairly unconvincing and “distressed” faux art/photo image. I’m not totally against these, when used with constraint they can produce some wonderful work, but the reality is they get overused without much thought and specific effects tend to come and go out of fashion quickly. What I have been looking for is something that lets you leave your own marks but at the same time borrows heavily from the colour and perhaps composition of the photo. An interpretation of the essence of the photo’s subject not a slavish representation of all the detail. I have been using corel painter essential with a wacom tablet for a couple of years and like them but for this project I thought I might try out the new Painter Lite from Corel.(you can download a 15 day free trial) I was primarily interested in any new brushes and changes to the colour mixing panel.
  
After selecting a suitable photo I used the clone tool in Corel Photo Paint, but any software with a clone tool will do, to remove a few unnecessary details (eg all the people other than the guy sailing the yacht). I also extended the canvas, using the sky colour and smeared the edges a little.

Rather than directly altering the photo I first loaded my photo into the canvas and then created a new custom colour mix panel using the eye dropper on the image and the brush in the mix palette. Note I have taken a range oF colours and tones from the sky, water and sand and a few colours from the sails, boat hull and channel marker buoy. I have also mixed the colours a little. So there is a limit palette of colours mixed on my palette much like any artist might. Next I created a new layer and did a very rough composition sketch with a few key lines. This is just a guide for my painting and I will delete this layer later. Next is the fun bit I created another new layer between my canvas and the sketch layer and  using the gouache and target brushes to infill my sketch lines using the colours from the new mix panel to create a fairly strong underpainting. As you paint on this layer it becomes opaque hiding the photo underneath. I experimented with turning the canvas layer on and off and ended up liking the idea of having the photo open in a separate window as on onscreen reference rather than checking the underlying image on the canvas. Storing the image at this point as a ..riff file will store all the layers and setting. Next I turned off the guide sketch layer, Then I zoomed in blended and refined the image a little using the “wet” watercolour brushes and touched up the detail using a variety of smaller brushes and my custom colour mix, resisting the urge to overwork things too much. I also tried to delete the canvas layer but found I could not.  However if I saved the image as a .jpeg it only saved the layers I had selected as visible.

There are probably many other variants of this approach out there in corel and other packages but I was rather pleased with my results and the simplicity of the method.

Here is quiet a different take on painting onto a photo, again using Painter Lite, but this time the artist Claudia Salguero is using distortion tools rather than “digital” paint or ink.

I’m starting to think that this dipping a brush into a photo has enormous possibilities, with the potential to create good art rather than just another clone faux photo,

Cloning away the unwanted

Clone Tool is an unlikely name for a photo retouching tool, but it is the best way to remove blemishes of unwanted detail from a photo. It works by letting you pick up the another part of the picture and paste it into a different location (usually via a fixed offset. Most decent photo editors (I exclude phone apps which don’t routinely have an equivalent to a clone tool) will have clone tools (it may sometimes be called retouch, blemish removal or even a rubber stamp) and it is probably one tool you should learn to use, but with restraint. The basic operation is to select the clone tool, pick the point you want copied and the select the area you want it copied to  You can the generally move the paste point and the copy point will follow, click the mouse and paste tis new image will be copied. Its quiet natural once you get the hang of it, However if you are copying a lot of textured background you can end up with obvious repeating patterns if you are not careful so it pays to alter the relationship between your source and destination points from time to time and perhaps even the size to the section being copied. In this case I have used the clone tool in Corel photo-paint because I can control the size and type of brush How you set the source area, destination,etc varies a lot in the software so you will need to read the help, or the manual and practice a little. That skill can come in very handy from time to time, like now for me I like the photo of the bush turkey but not the wire fence.
 
A couple of minutes of cloning and the fence has gone. A little tweak of clarity and vibrance to 'lift" the final image.

PhotoProject:: getting rid of the ghosts (almost)

This autostiched panorama was taken on the point smythe beach walk for the "summer by the sea 2008" program for coast action/coast care. Unfortunately sone of the figures are ghosts because they moved between exposures, Not something I could really do much about at the time, or even less about now. However there are wonderful tools available to do photo manipulations these days. I have not written about them much because I tend not to use them. An exception and a great tool, is the clone tool. Here am using the clone tool in corel paint. Not all free or "packaged with camera" software has this feature but the free to download paint.net does have a great version of this tool, if you want to try one out. Basically the clone tool allows you to copy another small part of the photo over the top of something your want to remove. This preserves the "texture" of the local area on your photo surface and genrally does a great job of concealing things. I also used cloning to get rid of a couple of pesky dust dots in the sky. The one problem I had to compromise were the heavily ghosted two figures in the middle, without them the composition was weakened, so these two ghost got to stay.