Monday, 26 October 2026

[dewarp]

The 4th image in my collection is titled "Kalk Bay Depiction".

Kalk Bay is a small village near here that has a fishing harbour. We occasionally have camera club outings there, and this edit came out of the most recent one.

   

This image took a lot more effort than might appear at first sight. First of all, the boat was to the right of the centre line, which didn't suit my envisaged composition. The job of masking it out was pretty difficult, due mainly to lots of clutter behind the handrails. Next the boat and its reflection were cut out of the scene, and a new boat-free background image was constructed. I then used the Fractalius filter on the background, and blended it in to create the interesting effects seen on the buildings. The Fractalius bits were only included above the walkway. I pasted the boat/reflection back into the scene, and then used the Topaz Simplify filter on the water/reflections. Finally, things were cleaned up a bit using local hand cloning.

[Dave]

What a great image!

I know  what you mean about some images requiring a lot of work. Although I don't use any 3rd-party plugins (I used to have the Nik suite but lost it when a previous PC crashed - I'll have to see if it's available for Photoshop Elements because I really liked their B&W conversions). But I use adjustment layers on almost every image, often multiple times: usually Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation. I also use Content-Aware Fill on most images. And I apply sharpening on copies of layers. In all cases I control where the adjustment shows by painting on  the adjustment layer. Plus I have a standard set of adjustments I typically run in Camera Raw.

I think the most layers I've used on a single image is 17 to 20.

[Man From Ironbark]

Agree with Dave. Really pleasant image resulting from a lot of work. I haven't played with Photoshop since PS2 days. Thus, my images are less worked upon.