Nuthatch Revisited

I believe that I have posted, if not this exact image, then one very similar to it. What is different this time is that I have processed the image using my stamp filtering process. 

With this image shot at ISO-100, I am a little surprised at how much noise you find in the background. However, as they say, there's noise, and then - there's noise. The kind of noise that you see in this image is not the same kind of noise as what you would see in, say, an ISO-1600 image. Where the noise comes into play in this image is due to the low light levels, as I was shooting later in the day (and with my exposure level turned down in order to get a quicker shot.)

Here is the colorized version.

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Fly Away, Chickadee

In order to capture an image like this one, my camera needed to have a crazy high shutter speed. (I usually do well hand-holding the camera at a shutter speed of 1/25 sec. or faster.) This image was shot at 1/800 sec., which I achieved by setting my camera ISO higher (at ISO-1600). I also dropped my exposure bias to -1.7, making the image darker (and also, then, quicker.) The problem here is that all sorts of noise was then captured in the image. While a noise reduction filter helps, the noise is still present - as you can see quite vividly in the stamp filter image (the second one.) With better lighting conditions, you can get a better image. However, the chickadee wasn't sitting around under studio lights, and so you sometimes have to take the image that you can get.

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Noisy Image of a House Finch

I started off with a noisy image of a house finch. (I don't recommend starting off with a noisy image; it's just what I had.) I applied the noise remover in Paintshop Pro, and this is what I came up with:

The Dry Brush filter in Photoshop helped to make the noise a little less noisy, but not a whole lot.

For kicks, I ran the image through the stamp filter process. The stamp filter picked up all sorts of things...

And when I layered the color version of the Dry Brush filter back in...

And that's what I did with a noisy image of a house finch on my bird feeder. Thanks for stopping by!

Finch on the Feeder

Here's a comparison edit of a finch on the feeder, one in color, one in black and white. 

Mourning Dove Redux

Mourning Dove

 This was the image that I started with.

This was the image after I ran the above image through the stamp filtering process and did some erasing:

And this is the image after I layered the color back in:

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Rainbow Alongside the Road

Moving Butterfly

Sometimes, if you set your shutter speed too lowly, you get a blurry picture. If you don't want a blurry picture, then it's bad. If you want a blurry picture, it can suggest movement, kind of like with the butterfly wings in today's photo.

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Bicycle House (Stamp Filter)

When it comes to something like buildings, I would expect the stamp filter to be able to make some nice images, given that buildings are made up of... straight lines. (Rocket science, right?) So, for today's images, I used this picture of a building with bicycles decorating the wall. (It's a bicycle shop.)

If first turned this into a stamp filtered image, level 5 light/dark. On its own, this isn't a bad "line drawing," but in my black and white images, I like the depth that is added by more shading.

So I generated a darkness/light 10 image:

And 15:

And by the time you get to twenty, the twenty image (on its own) is really dark. (They do get darker, but this is as dark as I went for this project.)

I layered them all together, starting with the first image (the 5), and then adding in the darker layers at lesser levels of opacity. The 10 - 75%, the 15 - 50%, and the 20 - 25%. After a little bit of Photoshop touch-up, I had the following image:

One more thing that I like to do is to layer the color image back into the stamp filtered image. For this project, I did so at a 60% opacity.

That's it! I'm still experimenting with the process, but that's the general course that I follow in generating my stamp filtered images. Thanks for stopping by!

Butterfly's Got a Story to Tell

This butterfly looks like it's being emphatic in trying to tell some story, even pointing with its wing, but the lady in the background behind it kind of distracts the attention away from the butterfly in the foreground.

In the black and white stamp filtered version, the lady recedes into the background, but the butterfly also fades into the leaf. Will it ever be able to tell its story? ;) Thanks for stopping by!

Rock Formation

It's possible that I have edited this image before, but there's something that I like about the way these rocks were layered into the side of the hill. I'm fairly certain that they were landscaped as part of a park restoration project, but the fact that they were arranged doesn't detract from the visual experience, at least not for me. (We could probably talk at length about subjects being 'arranged' for photography, going back to Matthew Brady and photography during the Civil War, but I don't think that landscaping quite falls along the same lines.) Well, that's my photo for today. Thanks for stopping by!

Windy Cat

There's not too much to say here, except that... it was a windy day. And, there was a cat. 

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Little Bird Under the Evergreen

Today's picture is a chipping sparrow hanging out under the evergreen tree. Thank for stopping by!

Finch in the Grass

There is just enough bird in this image to be able to stand out from the surrounding grass. I frequently find a weird wavy haziness in certain parts of images that have grass in them, which is the way that it is also in the top of this image. I usually take care of it with a dry brush filter, but... not today.

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HDR Trees and a Golden River

The HDR Inside of a Lovely Wooden Bridge

I am revisiting (and revising) an image from a few years ago of the inside of a lovely wooden bridge. (If you like wood and its texture, that is.) Here is the HDR image:

Here is the version that I "stamp filtered":

And here finally is the graphic novel version, the one where I layered the HDR color version into the black and white stamp filtered version:

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Palette Knife Filter on a Butterfly Image

The thing about the artistic filters on Photoshop is that, while they are cool, you have to make some judicious choices about how much detail you're willing to part with in an image. It's kind of a subjective thing, how much you are willing to keep or let go. What I have found is that there are certain parts of an image that I wouldn't mind losing, while there are other parts of the image that I would rather keep. (For those images, I've usually done some form of copy, cut, paste, and blend together.) The image above is a straight up palette knife filtered image.

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It's Raining on Zoo Ducks (Dry Brush Filter)

There was something about this image that seemed to be begging for a Dry Brush filtering. Maybe it's just been a while since I have Dry Brush filtered an image. Well, here you go! (Sorry, the image may not be reused.)

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Bluebird of Yesteryear (Stamped)

Here is the cropped version of the bluebird photo, without the HDR editing.

I processed the above image as a black and white stamp filtered image.

Here is the first image as it looks when processed for HDR. (Notice that the HDR processing brought out a lot of noise in the image.)

And here finally is the stamp-filtered version of the HDR image. The details on the bird are more pronounced than in the non-HDR version. I think that I like the bird better here but the background better in the other image. (Though, of the four, my favorite is the first image.)

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