PhotoProject :: Building a “Hand Drawn Photo” in 3 layers

I felt it was time to do something creative for this blog (and instagram). I had selected this photo of the young Osprey on the nest on the Mooloolaba spit to make a painting or perhaps a pastel drawing. However I felt it also need to be reinterpreted as a “hand draw photo” using a combination of rendering approaches.

First I loaded the original photo into Google Deep Dream Generator and used the Abstract Nature trained AI filter. This created a darker rendering but I loved the strong blue colouring of the sky. Next I took this new version into Corel Painter as the work to base a clone painting using the artist impressionist clone brush and a linen surface texture and also emphasised warm colours or the plumage and nest.

For the Final Work (above) I used On1 Photo RAW and load the original photo as the base layer and the Clone painting as the second layer. Then I used soft light blending mode and used a semi-opacity masking, a lot like a homemade luminosity mask to bring out some of the original photo (eg almost 100% masking over the eye and beak, but variable 75% or lower on selected parts of the nest and feathers). I also lifted the vibrancy of the blue and yellow/oranges a fraction to give me a strong complimentary colour feel. Finally I cropped in a little to add a bit more drama to the composition.

PhotoProject :: The Ospreys :: World Photography Day

Today is apparently World Photography Day. If you have been following my @normhansonphoto instagram feed you will have notice a couple of photos of an Osprey nest high on a pillar of the Mooloolabar spit, taken at different times of the day and under different lighting. Unfortunately the Osprey where largely in silhouette. So today I decide to get up early and walk to the spit (a little over 3km away). Hoping I could get close but on the eastern side in the morning light to get a lot of detail on the Osprey, and hopefully well lit eyes.

The walk was pleasant, and the big Sunshine Coast Marathon was finishing so the road blocks where being removed. However when I arrived at the nest only the chicks where home. After a short wait I could here one parent squeals and suddenly they where on the nest. I missed then flying in (and out). Still I had my long lens (zoomed out to 300mm) on and switched to S (shutter speed mode) and high speed burst mode. At 200 ISO and 1/400th second  f8 to f11 giving a good exposure, all good. The parent had returned without food so there was a bit of complaining and they where scanning the skies for their partner. I moved around to the eastern side to get the best morning light on the birds and got many shots, even though they are stationary on the nest their heads where turning constantly so the burst mode helped get the best head position. Still I had a lot of almost duplicate images and ended up deleting approx. 30%. Then as quickly as they came the parent dove from the next and disappeared. I wasn’t quick enough to capture them in flight. Still I was happy with my efforts.

Continuing my comparison of the “out of camera” Jpegs (without enhancements) from the Olympus, shown on right, with post processed RAW (.orf) file (above). The out of camera shots continue to look good (the biggest difference here is the post process cropping and a tiny amount of tonal tweaking).  I had used the 2x button to get the extra zoom, but it actually only works on the jpeg, but there is plenty of detail in the RAw image for heavy cropping to work well.