Watercolor - ish

[Saorsa]

Playing with FastStone and bumpmaps and opacity ended up giving me some well defined but delicately colored images. These were taken as documentary photographs of plants but I kind of like the effect I get.

Sea Oats


Marsh Pink

[JohnRostron]

Very nice. Could you please give us details of your procedure? I have had difficulty understanding the concept of bumpmaps.

John

[Saorsa]

Very nice. Could you please give us details of your procedure? I have had difficulty understanding the concept of bumpmaps.

John

Hi John,
There are any number of technical discussions on bumpmaps. In most instances they are used to detect and refine texture in an image. They generally give you a 'trace' of the primary outlines within an image that ends up looking like a monochrome line drawing.

I use FastStone as a quick image editor and for quick cropping and resizing before publication of an image. One of the tools it provides is bumpmap along with other filters like grey scale, sketch, painting, etc. filters. My primary use of bumpmap is to check composition since it eliminates all color and leaves me with the bare bones of the image to look at.

Here is the original of the Sea Oats Image


I didn't like the striation of the blue in the background so my first inclination was to try it as a monochrome



Meh, not much improvement, the background is still muddled and I didn't quite like the placement with a bit too much emptiness on the right. I decided to just click on bumpmap to see the 'shape' of the picture and liked what I saw.



Suddenly the awkward striation was gone and I could see exactly what the back of my head was trying to tell the front what it wanted to see. It was a little too stark though so I reduced to opacity to allow some of the underlying color to come through.

Bingo, the green shows it is a plant and the shades of blue (which didn't have well defined 'edges') are now nice soft undefined shades of grey/blue.



I think the marsh pink is less successful due to background clutter but it was hard to crop without having lines leading out of the frame.

[Saorsa]

When I got my fisheye I was running around pointing it every which way and trying to learn how to us it. I'm sure you've all seen this picture before. Every photographer who has procured a fisheye and happened to be in a pine forest has taken it. It's usually the first shot you get that doesn't have your feet or shadow in it.



I found it a little more interesting converting it to a bumpmap and using the color picker to give it a dark copper color.

[Shadowman]

Very nice.

[IzzieK]

Nice shot. Good explanation. Something to further my learning experience too.