Student Work – Photo Images To Art Work

Much of our class time is spent making good photo images significantly better or saving those that did not quite come out right when we took them. This week, I thought I would share some images from a student, Judy Yao, who converted some photos into artwork. The techniques she used were based on the general techniques she had learned in class.

I the first pair, Judy used Clone Stamp tool to remove the three people in photo taken at the Alamo. Then she applied pen-ink and watercolor combination effect technique without using any texture effect.

The Original

 

Final result:

 

For the picture of the grass, Judy started with a pen and ink rendering then adjusted the hue/saturation and then solarized the photo.

The Original:

Her final image.

 

For following image, Judy used pen and ink rendering and also applied a light fresco texture.

The Original

 

The Final Result.

 

This time, Judy started with a nice photo below of some daisies. This time she used the pen and ink technique but didn’t add any texture and then adjust the color and hue.

To end up in with the following image.

 

And for her final photo of a kettle shown below, Judy applied the basic pen-ink approach we learned in class.

The final image.

 

Starting with the basic techniques we learned in class, Judy has taken her already nice photographs to and entirely new level by converting them to works of art. The technique is relatively easy to apply, it just takes some creativity on the part of the photographer, as Judy’s images show to do this.

It’s Hard to Get Rid of Things

I am getting ready to participate in our neighborhood’s annual garage sale. It is a big event in the local area. It’s well publicized and people seem to come from everywhere. You have to be very careful coming and going to your home, because people and cars are everywhere on the neighborhood streets.

One of the items I was preparing to sell on eBay or include in my garage sale list was an old slide duplicator attachment made for a RCA video camera I had in the early 80s. I sold the camera many years ago in a previous garage sale. I had never really used the attachment, because the quality of the slides as recorded on the video tape was so poor it was not worth the effort. The technology was not ready for what I wanted to do. By the way, this attachment was for a video camera that recorded onto a standard VHS video tape, so you can imagine how bulky and heavy the camera was.

The attachment itself is an RCA Model FSA 036A Slide Adapter that originally cost $100. Mine looks brand new and is still in its original box with all of the packing material, included the plastic bags holding some of the accessories – some unopened. The kit includes the basic slide adapter itself, a filter, filter size adapters, and slide holders for 35 mm and at least 110 mm film strips as well as a slide holder.

In my garage sale preparation, I also ran across an unopened package of GAF Pana-Vue slides of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Over the years they had deteriorated to the point where the image was almost pure red. At first I thought I would try to see what I could do with them in Photoshop Elements. But I quickly discovered they would not fit my 35 mm slide scanner. They were a bit too big, which probably explains why the package was never opened.

As I was getting the slide adapter ready for sale, I thought I would see if could be attached to my Canon XTi Rebel. Not only did it fit, I did not even have to use any of the filter size adapters that were part of the slide adapter kit. I also found that its slide holder was able to accommodate a slide slightly larger than the standard 35 mm size. With now preparation whatsoever, I attached the slide adapter to the Rebel, put in a tramway slide and, pointed the camera out the window, and took the picture. Some cropping/vignetting occurred. But it worked.

I now had a reasonable good copy of a badly damaged non-standard slide. I uploaded the picture to Photoshop Elements 6.0, and quickly found that not only was color gone, there were a lot of spots etc presumably caused by some sort of fungus, I guess. At any rate, I used Levels to bring back the color, the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush to fix the worst stains, and sharpened it a bit.

The result is shown below. This by no means is a good picture, but the improvement was dramatic.

Here is the XTi original.

 

It now looks like this.

 

There are four more pictures of the tram. Based on these results, I will try to salvage each of them. I have some old odd sized negatives that I might be able to do something similar to using the slide adapter. Needless to say, it will not be part of my garage sale items. In fact the slide adapters position in life has been raised from being stored on the shelf in the garage to now residing inside the house.

Until next time,

Don

PS Don’t hesitate to leave a comment. It seems that is the only way that I can tell if anyone has read the article.