What the lens saw

This was purely playing around. Some time ago I took this picture of a bunch of lenses through another lens with a low resolution digital camera. I created a mask for the glass in the barrels, then took a handful of picture and skewed them in various directions to match the directions of the lenses. I added some noise and used match color from the main image to the crops.

Rain Through the Viewfinder

I saw an article at Smashing Magazine about toy cameras and thought the techniques were cool. I loved the old viewfinder effect and decided to give it a try.

I took this photo on a rainy day at a Point Reyes farm a few months back. On Flickr I found a nice frame by xxrmt and it seemed like a nice fit.

To get this to work, I pasted the frame into a new layer, grabbed the handles to expanded it to fit the larger photo, committed the change and set the layer blend mode to multiply and that was it. Neat and easy.

Filtered Water

So here is a picture I took last weekend while investigating wedding spots for a friend. These bottles of water were in a plastic tub out on the deck supply counter for the restaurant. I was taking pictures of everything else so I figured I would shoot this as well. The first thumbnail is that photo cropped and re-sized.

The next three thumbnails are the same picture after I applied filters from Filter Forge’s 30 day trial. The first is “Comic Book”, the second is “Real Contrast” and the third is “Fiber Image”.  I adjusted the various settings on all three, the third one took forty minutes to process on my reasonably fast laptop. I love the comic book look and am thinking about running some of my older car pictures through it so see what can come up with.

The most frustrating part of all of this was the fact that 64 bit Photoshop does not recognize 32 bit filters and starts with out so much as an error. Once I discovered this and fired up the 32 bit version everything worked great.