Project 4: Karel Rasovsky

Filters

I set to “sharpen” a photo of stained glass window enlarged from a low-resolution original, sporting somewhat “soft” edges. Smart Sharpen was the filter of choice for this job. The trick was to enhance the natural beauty of the thousands of fine glass pieces an ancient artisan had to bring together to produce the mosaic. Setting Radius to extremely low value (0.4) worked beautifully on screen, resulting in precise, fine and more pronounced edges. Going above that would have destroyed the fine relieves. Turning on More Accurate further enhanced the effect, because in this case, I really wanted to pull out every detail. To return the colors to their pre-filter appearance, I applied Fade Smart Sharpen. My eyes could not tell the difference when editing on screen, but when I printed both versions, the one treated with Fade Smart produced more natural color scheme.

For the fun of it, I experimented with applying filters from the endless Photoshop gallery. None came close to the “real thing” sending them all into “delete” category. But after killing so much time, I was determined to find at least one worth mentioning. Here it is – view of a church window in a snow-covered wonderland. The recipe is really simple – apply Stylize/Trace Contour filter and experiment with the level value.

Layered composition

Starting the project, I only had a vague idea of a concept – bring together pictures from our vacation into a compelling composition. In the process of experimenting with masks, knockouts, luminance blending, content-aware scaling and warping, the project took on its own life as well as unexpected turns. What a journey!

The central image was modified with content-aware scaling to produce what now looks like an “endless” terrace garden above the city – the analogy of an endless summer - with my wife and son reduced to just tiny little specs. To produce this poster, I had to learn how to apply content-aware scaling for most natural results – in multiple passes of incremental steps. (Note: the only object that did not come out “proportionally” in this image is the utility pole in the middle. In the original image it was hardly noticeable, but here it shows like a long dark streak in the middle. Not bad though – touch of a surrealistic painting.)

Blending the various pictures into a montage was an opportunity to get plenty of practice in applying gradient fading and masks. For me, trial-and-error was the best way to figure out whether a clipping mask or a layer mask would produce the desired effect. Now, I definitely know how to quickly create, edit and activate them.

I wanted to preserve all objects in the picture “au natural”, so I approached the warp tool with skepticism. What a pleasant surprise this tool was! I learned quickly that it only takes a bit of imagination - and about 20 seconds of practice - to enhance reality without being overbearing. Take the “ice-cream heaven” pic – the boy figurine on top of the ice cream cone got elongated and became more central to the image, while the rounded top edge improves blending. The entire image now has an almost 3D-like feel to it.

On to luminance blending! I badly wanted to integrate the two stained glass images in the montage, to add more of a mystery mood to the composition. But how to do it? Luminance blending turned out to be the perfect answer. I started with two pairs of seemingly incompatible images and ended up with blends that look like they’ve always belonged together. The top/right pair is especially pleasing, giving the impression of my wife walking in front of a mystical dome floating behind her. The effect of depth is incredible. From now on, luminance blending is my tool of choice whenever two overlapping images are involved.

Putting on an engraving was an opportunity to learn about creating a group of layers and how to apply knockout effect. The title/inscription was created as a text knockout through all layers but the bottom gold/yellow background. I hope you enjoy the final result.