photo doodle: the ash tree

More experimental doodling with Photo XI. The original shot was taken a month ago and shows one of the trees in front of our house momentarily lit by the sun peeping through dense rain clouds. It's taken quickly through the window as there wasn't much time before the sun disappeared again. I suppose it was one of those magical moments difficult to capture in a single still. Anyway, I thought I'd see what I could do to create an image which conveys something of the experience.
It really was a doodle so it won't be a reliable account but I split the image twice in RGB and CMYK, discarded all but the red, cyan and magenta. Then I tweaked the levels of each to get the best contrast of tree against sky before combining the three channels in RGB: red to red, cyan to green, and magenta to blue. Unsharp mask was used to create contrast and darken the greys. Then I copied the original colour image as a new top layer, pushed the saturation and lowered the transparency just to give the merest whiff of colour - I'll still call it B&W.

the ash tree

olive grove poppies

I'm enjoying getting to know the latest version of paintshop pro, Photo XI. I like the way the command history is now located on a palette which allows you to toggle and jump across previous commands rather than just linearly, though I can get a bit lost. Eventually I get down to comparing two results where I can't choose which one I prefer - too much green, too little green? I found getting satisfactory rendering of the red on green difficult: I find red is often awkward to get to look natural but if you tweak the green and blue too much the background begins to look fake. It doesn't help to know that the palette of greek greens is slightly different to those of english greens. There is a temptation to go surreal at this point but I remind myself it's not what I'm after.

As it turned out Image #2 had the minimal amount of curve adjustment and I think I prefer it the best. Sometimes you have to trust the camera.

These poppies were growing in an olive grove in front of a zakynthian house near where we were staying. Unusual as we didn't see any other poppies growing in such profusion anywhere else.

poppies #1

poppies #2

poppies #3

poppies #4

geometric

I'm inspired once more to do some photography and I've refurbished the Soup to render in Firefox which seems to be the only way I can post images on blogger in Vista. Also it's an opportunity to make use of the labels. The new banner was photographed last year on Zakynthos, along the little beach.

Here are some images I took with a geometric theme, in and around our apartment on Zakynthos this year. They are taken in colour mode, as always, but I thought I'd experiment with monochrome to tighten up the theme. Image #1 was achieved using RGB channel splitting, image #2 using CMYK splitting and image #3 using RGB channel mixing - each method chosen for no reason other than experimentation. Image#4 is a combination of splitting, discarding and combining channels.

geometric #4

geometric #3

geometric #2

geometric #1