Category: Techniques

Gordon Campey referred me to an article by Mark Johnson that is in the Member’s area of the NAPP website that deals with painting light and shadow onto an image to give it more depth.  When combined with the Orton Effect, it can make that technique even more interesting.

With some input from Gordon I created a Painting with Light and Shadow action set.  I’ve got two actions in the set, one that simply creates a layer to lighten and layer to darken the images.  Select the layer mask of the appropriate layer and paint with White on that mask to lighten or darken an area of the image.

Not the greatest example, but I had this shot of a fender from a tricycle:

To add some depth and contrast into this image, I applied the Paint with Light action, and painted Light onto the yellow areas and Shadow onto the blue, red and black areas.

You can see how much darker and more saturated the reds and blues are, and the yellow becomes more yellow and less orange.

The Paint with Light action simply creates a layer with a Screen blend mode (makes things lighter) and a Multiply mode (makes things darker).  The layer masks are filled with black, so they do not apply any affect to the image.  By selecting the layer mask and painting with a soft brush with White, it will reveal some of the lighter color underneath.  I’ve seen a number of people use brushes with differing opacities, but I personally like a very low opacity, in the range of 20 – 30%.

I normally paint in Light first, then follow that up with Shadow, but a different approach may work for you.

I thought that I would show this one again, using this alternative to the Orton Effect technique from my earlier post.

To this one:

This action creates a blur layer, then adds a single Levels layer that will probably require adjustment in terms of both the White point and the mid-point sliders to achieve the desired neutral effect.  It creates the same Paint with Light and Paint with Shadow layers as the above action, and the same adjustments should be applied here.

In this image I needed to lighten the trees in the background, and darken the barn and the foreground bushes and flowers.

I’ve been impressed with some of the Orton Effect montages that I’ve seen over the years.  I have seen many methods on the web for producing the effect in Photoshop, but was happiest with the method that André Gallant taught me when I was attending his workshop.

I was later introduced to another Canadian photographer, Gordon Campey, by a fellow student at the Freeman Patterson and Andre Gallant workshop.  Gordon introduced me to an NAPP  article that added a unique, but critical in my opinion, step to the creation of the Orton Effect.  That step was an increase in the size of the blurred layer of 1% – 2%.  It helps to give that larger “glow” in the overlay that so often occurs when creating this technique with slide film.  I have incorporated that transformation of the blurred layer into this action.

The Orton Effect allows you to take a relatively bland image like this:

Into something like this:

There are two separate actions in the Action Set to account for Smart Objects.  In the default action I used a Smart Object so that you can adjust the Gaussian Blur that is applied to blurred image after the action is complete.  To account for Photoshop prior to CS3, I included a version that does not use the Smart Object, but it requires you to set the Gaussian Blur appropriately when you run the action.

After you run the action, you may need to set the White Point on the Levels 1 copy layer as it has a tendency to be pretty dark.  That is the only adjustment that I made to the above image.

I have to give credit to Michael Orton for creating this technique.  Although I have not read it yet, I recently purchased his book “Photographing Creative Landscapes, Simple Tools for Artistic Images and Enhanced Creativity”.  I look forward to reading it.

Like so many people, I tend to be deadline driven, and these first few posts are definitely that way. On Tuesday this week I am scheduled to give a presentation on Montages at my camera club, NVPS.  In preparation for that presentation, I’d like to have a number of my actions posted so that people will be able to download them following the presentation.  So that is why the double post on Sunday.

I had never even heard of a Mirror Montage until a couple of years ago when one of our members did an entire portfolio of Mirror Montages.  I believe that all of them were glass and steel buildings, so lots of mirrored glass and strong lines running out of the frame.  If you’ve never seen (or noticed a Mirror Montage) before, you essentially create bookends by duplicating an image and flipping it over, then butting the two halves together.

I took this image of a building with the highlighted tree:

And created a Mirror Montage with it to get this:

Many might argue about the rotation of the final image, but I liked the broader base holding the decreasing width building better than having the dark colors at the bottom and moving to the lighter colors.  Flipping it also has the benefit of creating a strong “peak” with the converging lines of the building. Oh well, you just can’t win them all!

The action set has 4 actions in it, depending on whether you want to mirror on the Top, Left, Right or Bottom of the existing image.  How you rotate the image after that is really up to you.

Another action that I have been working on a for a while is an Overlay montage action. I love a well done overlay, but I have difficulty myself determining which pairs of images will really compliment each other.  Over the last year I have found myself very attracted to shots of pure texture, and I’ve been working at merging those with appropriate images to produce nice overlays.  I’ve developed an action that creates the overlays by prompting you to open a second image, and then overlaying the two images.

Here is an original image, just some nice Babies Breath in front of a Rose:

Here is the texture image, a close up of a canon from the Yorktown Battlefield:

Here is the resulting overlay montage:

To run this action you do the following:

1. Open the subject image.
2. Run the action.
3. You will be prompted to open the overlay image.
4. Press Continue and an Open dialog will be displayed.
5. Select the texture image and press Open.
6. Use the Levels layers to adjust the relative brightness of each of the images, and the overall brightness of the image.

There is a “Stop” function at the end that displays a dialog with my website and blog address.  You can disable this by opening the action clicking on the check mark next to the Stop step.

For that matter, you can turn off the Stop function between images too if it is slowing you down.

I created this Action Set to produce a Reverse Montage. In simple terms, the background layer is duplicated and then the Duplicate layer is either flipped vertically or horizontally, or it is rotated. I’ve created separate actions for each of these types.

One of the actions was used to convert this close-up shot of a Ferrari F430

to a much more abstract-looking image like this:

I’ve worked with two separate techniques for creating these montages, one is based on the Opacity of the layers and the other is based on a Multiply Blend Mode. In many images, the two techniques are hard to discern, but in most images the techniques produce markedly different results. One may routinely work better for you, and personally I prefer the Multiply method in general.

To create the final image, it is often desirable to select the Duplicate layer and use the Move tool to adjust where the images should overlap. Then crop the image to the size and shape that is most appropriate for that image.

These actions are not intended to provide a completed image, but create all of the layers necessary to complete the effect. They simply eliminate all of the repetitive functions with approximate adjustments that can be fine tuned for individual images.

You can download the 6 separate actions as a single Action Set. Instructions for loading the Action Set are pretty simple. If you don’t understand mine, there are numerous other references on the Internet.

The actions are developed and tested on Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Mac, but they should function with most versions of Photoshop CS and Elements. If you have any difficulty, please drop me a comment here.