[Rob Barron]

I thought I'd have a little play with this picture as I liked it but couldn't get the ruin to stand proud of the foliage. I have not applied any arty filters to this, I stumbled across an interesting technique that just worked nicely. I won't tell you what I did yet but I will if enough people care :o) (The things we say to encourage comments <g>)

Anyway, hope you like it. C&C as usual.

Cheers,
Rob

[fionaB]

thats lovely Rob, and u do realise u have to tell us what the technique was!

Fi

[danpen]

Great subject, great composition, good colours.

From an image this size I can't say whether I like the processing or not, it seems rather oversharpened and a bit harsh but I suspect that's not how a fullsize copy would look.

cheers

Dan

[Markulous]

Can see why you wanted to make more of this tho' it does seem to have resulted in pinkish bricks and main building seems slightly seperated from the remainder (seperately processed/sharpened?)

[Rob Barron]

There is a very good reason why the chimney appears to have pinkish bricks.... it is a pinkish-coloured brick chimney :o)

Although the building and chimney are clearly related (I have no idea what exactly they were used for originally) the house is mainly greys but the chimney is a pink though weather-worn colour. This does, I entirely agree, give the feeling of separating the two but actually that is how it is in real life.

The way in which I managed to achieve separation between the building and the mass of like-coloured foliage all around it is as follows:

I duplicated the whole picture to a new layer and converted this layer to mono using the channel mixer. At that point I was planning to make it a mono image but the separation proved nigh on impossible. Sp I played around trying all sorts of things. I tried but rejected using LucisArt filter as it made it look very false and too much like an artist's impression which is what I didn't want.

The result I wanted came when I changed the blending mode on the mono layer to Luminosity. This was very strong but I reduced the opacity to about 70% which gave me what I wanted. For some the effect might still be too sharp in which case I could easily have reduced the opacity further but this was the level I liked.

I had never tried blending a mono image on top of a coloured image in this way before but I was pleased with the way it turned out.

As often seems to happen, we get a feeling of one item being too sharp and having a cut-out and stuck on appearance but this does not happen in the full resolution printed version. Guess we just have to accept that as a limitation of showing pictures at low resolution on the internet.

Anyway, I will certainly try this method on other pictures in the future and see what elements it seems to work best on.

Cheers,
Rob

[sweet_sac]

Really interesting technique Rob, loving it!

I'll be giving this a shot on some photos soon hopefully!