The other day on the drive home from visiting our new home that is currently under construction, I stopped on the roadside to take a few snapshots of this scene of Mt. Baker. Dave had showed me a quick way to blend two exposures together which I knew I needed to do to capture all of the detail of this scene. The result of blending the exposures was disappointing but I was determined to re-create the mood that my eyes had seen which my camera clearly could not. I ended up with a painterly effect which works perfectly for me. I did not use any Artistic or Brush Stroke filters to achieve this effect. What you see is a result of five some odd hours of experimentation and tweaking of Curves, Levels, Saturation and Hues as well as Noise Reduction and a final Diffuse layer to mute the white halos or glowing edges. Hope you like it (you may want to go fullscreen [F11] to view the large images as the gallery doesn’t have scrollbars).

Joe says…
This is still v.2 of the image (click for large, v.3 image) but I thought it would be interesting to point out the problems I’m working to fix.

It really does look nice the way it is, but if you wanna get picky (and I do) then you might notice as Dave did:

Also, if you’ll look at the plane’s engine furthest away, the background is washed out (which is fine) but starts to come back in as it creeps up to the engine and makes you ask, “what the heck is that?”

And as you can see, we’re merrily on our way to v.3.

By the way, here is the original source image which is simply a snapshot I took with my Canon A80 during a visit to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

Dave says…
I printed version 2 on my EPSON Stylus Photo 1280 yesterday and I gotta say…damn it’s looking good. The print was lying on my conference table when a client came in this morning. When I told her a buddy of mine had done it she was very impressed. I of course changed my tune and took all the credit. ;)

Dave says…
Joe, here’s how you get that “dream” effect:

Duplicate the layer. Apply a Gaussian Blur to the duplicated layer (in this case, 4.0). Apply the “Hard Light” blend mode. That’s it. I flattened the image and played with Levels a little.

Joe says…
Thanks Dave. I tried it quickly with this photo I took in Oregon. It does seem to give that effect I’m after. With some fiddling I can probably get it. Thanks again.

Dave says…
Check this out - a before and after:

I didn’t do a thing to the before picture - not even adjust levels. I’ll tell you why in a second. This time, I took the layer, duplicated it, and applied a Gaussian blur of 5.0 pixels. Then I applied a blend mode of Hard Light. I duplicated the original layer again, but this time a Gaussian of 2.0, and the blend mode is Screen. I liked the effect I got but then remembered that I hadn’t fixed the color balance on the original. When I tried that, it turned out the result was too blown out in the highlights. I kinda dig the way it turned out without any Levels or Curves futzing.

He’s another one, with more goofing off involved (click for a bigger version). The leaves are pretty cool.