— While creating a stunning work of photo artistry clearly requires far less effort than crafting an elaborate oil painting in the style of the Old Masters, it still requires more than a fair amount of time and effort and creative vision. At least it does if you want to create something excellent.
Capturing a great initial image (or set of images) is itself a challenge. And to push those images further, to create something amazing with them, there’s still a good amount of work to do after the shutter clicks. You don’t just open Photoshop, press a button, and end up with something great.
The first image featured here makes for a perfect example of what I mean. This image is quite wonderful and would look fantastic as a canvas print. But it wasn’t painted. It began with AWAKE artist Debbie De Juan collecting some flowers and arranging them just so … capturing a series of photos until she found the one she liked best …
From there she took the images into her iPad and experimented quite a while with apps, settling on an effect she was able to produce using the app “Tangled.” And with the initial effect in place, she exported the image, moved it over to her PC, and opened it in Photoshop.
There she introduced several artistic textures by designer Jai Johnson, experimenting with blend modes until she settled on keeping one at normal and a reduced opacity, another at Soft Light, and another at Overlay. And then, to add a finishing touch, she layered in some specks of “pollen” on their own layer set to Lighten.
Might not have taken a full week at a canvas with paints, but it did take real creative effort, and the end result is extraordinary.
Here’s another wonderful example, this time a stunning artistic portrait by AWAKE artist Siegart von Schlichting.
No paint brush or oils required. Yet everything from the original photograph to the artistic rendering is exquisite.
An image like this begins with a great photo (beautiful model, beautiful lighting, all that). But then it’s pushed further. It’s carried into a whole other realm when an artist is willing to devote a few hours to refining the image creatively in Photoshop.
In this particular piece that process included not only blending in backgrounds and textures (each carefully controlled with layer masks) and introducing a great many adjustment layers, but also some extremely clever manipulation of the angle of the model’s head and hair (lots of work styling her hair!).
Combine all this with careful creative blur and an elegant desaturation of the tonal palette … and you end up with a simply gorgeous work of art.
Or take this next piece by AWAKE artist Sherri Reed. The intention here was clear from the start: deliberately set about to emulate the painterly effects of the Old Masters. Sherri began with her photo in Lightroom where she got her initial editing started. But from here it wasn’t a simple “click-a-button paint effect” she pulled off. Not anything like that, in fact.
First she had to carry the image into Topaz Simplify and experiment with a variety of oil painting settings before then carrying it over to Topaz Impression, where she unexpectedly found that stacking on a Georgia O’Keefe approach gave her the results she was looking to achieve. And it was only in the blending of these two approaches (and the hours of experimenting with how they were executed) that she was able to reach the point at which she could take the layers over into Photoshop.
Once there, she brought in some textures at unexpected blend modes like Color and Pin Light, further controlling these with layer masks, adjustment layers, and a 50-percent gray Overlay layer for dodging and burning … All this to craft the end result she was after.
Here too, the final piece is extraordinary. But it took considerable creative experimentation, multiple programs, a great many layers …
Indeed, you can take this kind of approach even further, introducing dozens and dozens of layers, each controlled by blend modes and layer masks, refined through clipped adjustment layers and a variety of lighting effects — all manner of wizardry, in fact — and turn out an image in the end that expresses an imaginative idea clearly suited more to a painter’s canvas than anything a camera could ever capture.
And works like these — like the extraordinary piece here, by AWAKE artist Louise Campbell — truly give full reign to an artist’s imagination.
Indeed … anything you can dream up, you can bring to life on canvas.
But it takes time.
A composition like this can easily take 10 to 20 hours to create. From coming up with the idea, to image-gathering and conducting the photo shoot (here the model was captured by The Colby Files, also of AWAKE) to compositing the piece, finessing all the layers and masks, sculpting the lighting and shadows throughout, and then on through all the many steps required in post-production to refine and unify the tonality of the final completed work …
Ultimately, it requires an extraordinary artistic mind (and lots of trial and error!) to compose and craft an image of this caliber.
It might not take a month at an easel with paint brush and canvas.
But it sure isn’t something you achieve with a few clicks of the mouse either.
The possibilities open to ambitious creative artists today are absolutely extraordinary. The cameras we have available to us, the sophisticated software (and even phone apps) we are able to use, all the amazing approaches and techniques and creative resources we are able to bring to the endeavor — it’s wonderful. Just wonderful.
And the work we’re seeing created as a result of all this is an absolute delight.
What’s more, no film-developing chemicals to worry about, no paint brushes to clean!
It’s fantastic.
These are exciting times.
– Sebastian
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