Goldfinch (Dry Brush vs. Stamped Dry Brush)

For today's image, I started off with this goldfinch photo. It isn't focused the best, so I thought that maybe there was something that I could do with some of the filters that blur the image. 

Below is the Dry Brush filter version of the above picture. I tend to like Dry Brush filtered images, as the filter makes the image look something like a painting. 

Taking the Dry Brushed image, I created a black and white stamp filtered image, layering several different layers together (of lighter and darker images). For just a touch of color, I layered the color image at 67% opacity into the black and white image, coming up with the following result:

Of the three, I think that I like the Dry Brush filtered image the best, but it's fun to experiment and see what I can come up with using the different features of my photo editing programs. Thanks for stopping by!