Baltimore Oriole (Palette Knife filter -- Graphic Pen, Stamp)

I've been going through some of my older images that I have uploaded to my blog and processing them with the graphic pen and the stamp filters. This image was already processed first with the palette knife filter, as seen below:

I tonemapped the above image on Photomatix, since the HDR images tend to do better in the filtration. First is the black and white graphic pen:

Second, I layered the first image above (not the HDR) into the graphic pen bw image:

Next, I processed the HDR image with the stamp filter:

And then, I layered the first image into the bw stamp filtered image.

I really like how the oriole turned out in the original image. I think I had processed the image with a palette knife, because the background had originally been a little weird but was cleaned up by the palette knife filter. Processing the palette knife image through the graphic pen and stamp filters, the background again comes out looking weird, really drawing attention away from the bird (which should be the focus of the image.) The best of the graphic pen vs the stamp filtered images, in my opinion, is the bw graphic pen, followed by the colorized graphic pen.

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