freezing rain with a better outcome

[Dennis Bishop]

The freezing rain we had last weekend in this part of southeast Michigan left us with beautiful ice but didn't do any damage. A few days later, I learned that a friend about 10 miles south of here had no ice at all. Ten years ago, an early-April freezing rain put part of a large oak tree through my garage roof. Although the recent one kept me off the roads, it provided some great photo ops without the damage dealt to Toronto and some other regions.

Nikon D3S, ISO 200, f/14, five-exposure HDR at 1 EV intervals, 600 mm (200 - 400 zoom at 300 with a 2X teleconverter) from the dining room window

processing

• cropped for composition
• Topaz Simplify -- Watercolor II
• Alien Skin Snap Art -- Watercolor, Color blend mode
• Flypaper Textures -- three at reduced opacities and masked off leaves and icicles, Pin Light, Linear Light, and Linear Burn blend modes
• Even with all those textures, there was a large, empty, boring area in the lower left with nothing to take the eye back to the upper left. The Alien Skin Snap Art layer was copied, rotated 180 degrees, masked off the leaves and icicles, and applied at Color blend mode with reduced opacity to add the brownish orange of the leaves.
• a layer of rain (Pointillize, Threshold, Motion Blur, Unsharp Mask) was applied at reduced opacity, Screen blend mode
• To make it feel like the viewer was looking at the scene from inside, two Alien Skin Eye Candy layers were applied. One put the ice on the bottom; the other added the raindrops.
• six B&W layers -- 2 Fractalius, 2 Alien Skin Snap Art Stylize, 2 Topaz Simplify edges; all at Multiply blend mode except one of the Snap Art layers which was at Divide; various opacities (Bevel & Emboss was added to one of the 100% opacity layers to complete the inside-looking-out effect.)
• gradient vignette masked off the leaves and icicles

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Beautiful comp and colours Dennis. The rain is very convincing and I like the subtle frame. I really like the suggestion of the more faded OOF leaves in the BG.

[Judy Howle]

This image has so much going for it and into it, it's mind boggling! The colors and background are gorgeous, and the ice and raindrops are very well executed. Bravo!! You are amazingly creative Dennis.

[Cheryl Slechta]

Dennis, your workflow is a work of art I especially like the faded leaf colors in the background.

[Nancy Bell]

Spectacular! Beautiful composition, beautiful colors, great blending and great window-frame look! When are you going to produce that you-tube video on your technique?? Or maybe an e-book that you can sell?? Sign me up.

[Diane Miller]

I second the book or video -- you get a wonderful balance of lovely effects, and this one is just outstanding!! The palette is very pleasing.

[Arthur Morris]

Love the leaves and the ice but my favorite part of the image is the BKGR especially lower left.

[LinzRiverBalmer]

Beautifully done, looks like I'm sitting right there looking out of a window at these leaves.

[Anita Bower]

This is a really interesting image. Outstanding work. Love the effects you created on the leaves, the ice, the snow flakes. Turning the texture around was a great idea. Love the snow at the bottom and the window. A beautiful result. I, too, would welcome a video showing us how you do your creations, but, I understand if you prefer not to share. Also, I don't know how many of us would have the patience to do all the steps you go through. I think it is not so much the techniques, but how you use them that create such gorgeous images. Plus, beginning with an outstanding image.
Question: I've never used Alien Skin Snap Art. What do you particularly like about it?

[Dennis Bishop]

. . . I, too, would welcome a video showing us how you do your creations, but, I understand if you prefer not to share.

Question: I've never used Alien Skin Snap Art. What do you particularly like about it?

To tell the truth, I never took the video thing literally. Even if I had, I don't know how to pull it off. And -- although I have some common threads in all of my images -- my approach isn't always the same. I generally know what I want to end up with, but the how-to-get-there might not be so obvious to me. Sometimes, too, I end up with something different because of an idea that comes to me during processing. This image was certainly one of those.

Preferring not to share isn't an issue. I'm always happy to do that and would be glad to give out the preset settings I've saved in the software I use.

We had dinner with some friends just this evening, and I was talking about my OOTB experience. Honest. I don't remember how the conversation started, but I was saying how important it is to me to be active in a forum like this. There are a couple very competent photographers in the local digital photography group to which I belong, but there's not anyone that ventures nearly as far out of the box as I do. Besides the educational benefits of being active in OOTB, we get to share ideas with others who are also passionate about unconventional photography and/or processing. I think it's important for a number of reasons to be able to do that.

Along the way, I -- and, I expect, others -- have wished there were more opportunities to meet some of the people with whom we interact, here. And it could be for a variety of reasons. I've thought about this for a while, but most of us are so far apart geographically, I haven't come up with a solid idea to propose. If there were something workable, I could see a group of us getting together to talk about what we do (some presentations, perhaps, rather than just individual conversations) and to do some photography together. I'll keep thinking about it. Even if two or three of us could get together very informally during our travels, I'd look forward to that.

Wow, that was a lot more than I'd intended to say. On to Snap Art . . . I'm now on my third version of it. I first got it in 2010 because I didn't want my photos to look like photos, and it does a great job of making the image look like it was produced in any of a variety of artistic styles. There are numerous sliders that permit the user to alter the output to their liking. Probably about the same time, I started using Topaz Simplify, and it quickly became a routine part of my processing. For the most part, the only thing for which I was using Snap Art was to apply the loose (almost always black) lines I always apply to my images.

During a quick visit in October, we were staying with some friends, one of whom was an art major in college. At her request, I emailed copies of some images I'd processed from photos taken while we were there. Unknown to me at the time, the subject of one of them is very special to the couple, and they wanted to hang a print of it in their home. Over a period of about a week, I did variations using Snap Art based on her feedback. While doing that, I discovered something that I knew right away would become another routine part of my processing. In most of the artistic styles the program mimics, there's a slider for color variability. Their algorithms for color variability must include some elements of color harmony because the additional colors introduced through the "brush strokes" seem related to the colors in the image being processed.

I'll occasionally used the program to mimic an artistic style, but mostly I use it for the lines and for the wonderful dabs of color. I do the two separately because I use the Multiply or Divide blend modes on the lines (black or white, respectively) and the Color blend mode to add the colors without any canvas/paper texture or brush strokes. The user interface was fairly good, anyway, but it appears to have been the main focus in the most recent revision of the program. They very infrequently have special prices. I'm on their mailing list, so I know when that happens. If you do a trial and decide you like it, I can let you know when I see something about special pricing.

[Dennis Bishop]

It occurred to me that a couple pictures might illustrate, better than words, why I like Snap Art. Because of some things I did in processing, it wasn't practical to show the image for this thread with and without Snap Art, so I went back to this one. The left half has no Snap Art (black lines and color); the right half does. I try not to be too heavy-handed in applying effects, so the difference probably won't jump out, but it's there even though it's subtle.

[Anita Bower]

Dennis:

Many thanks for the detailed response! Yes, I see the difference in the two images you posted. Very helpful to see this.

I understand about not processing each image the same way.

Intriguing idea about an OOTB get-together. We could have our own mini-workshop just for ourselves.

When life settles down a bit, I'll try the Snap Art free trial.