Make like paint

Occasionally I like to make my photographs look a little less photographic and a little more drawn or painted. Over the years I have tried a lot of software to accomplish this with varying degrees of success and lack of. This last few days have been a concerted effort to find which software could produce the best results.

I had previously tried Virtual Painter 5 (now no longer available), Corel Painter (now only available as part of  a $600 package) and a few others that escape my memory (i.e. not memorable - literally).

This time I looked at four packages. I excluded anything costing over $100 as being too expensive for the use I would make of it and ended up looking at:
FotoSketcher (free),
GMX photo Painter (about $50),
Dynamic Auto Painter ($100) and
Snap Art 4 ($100).

First the exclusions;
Dynamic Auto Painter has a lot of people rooting for it. I didn't like the results. I really tried with this software, processing my test picture through about a dozen filters and post processing steps. The results were unconvincing. I also didn't like the way it messed with the colours. While there were detailed differences between the filters, the overall effect was sameness and a lack of differentiation. It’s also an overly complex program to come to grips with. Big fail.

GMX photo painter was much better. There are heaps of controls and, with some effort, good results could be obtained. But to get good results does require a lot of trial and error and patient work with a stylus. Don’t even think of using this program with a mouse! I liked this program a lot and if cost is an important factor then its a reasonable pick despite one or two little niggles (like the painting not going all the way to the top and left edges of the picture). I only really excluded this program because my final choice was just so much better. A free trial is available if you want to give it a try.

I’m keeping two of the programs:
FotoSketcher is brilliant for a free program. It doesn't have as many filters as some of the other programs but what it does have are very flexible. I found the best way to use this program was to produce a few JPGs with different settings and to combine the layers in Photoshop to produce the finished piece. In fact this is the strategy that I use with both my keepers. If you just want to play around and produce some reasonably impressive results then download FotoSketcher and give it a go.

My best keeper was Snap Art 4 from Alien Skin. It’s the easiest program of the four to learn and the results it produces from a single pass are truly impressive. However, produce separate layers for underpainting, body and details to combine in Photoshop and the results really surpass anything else I have ever tried. If you don’t have Photoshop then you can mask different setting from within Snap Art but I simply find using Photoshop easier. This program is a wonderful blend of power and ease of use. It also works as a stand alone program and as a plugin for photoshop, lightroom and other  graphics programs.

Here are my two test pictures (original photos from http://www.morguefile.co.nz/) processed in Snap Art 4 and Photoshop (view full size):

The emotional dimension

The goal, so I am told, is to envision the final picture before you press the shutter release; it's called having 'artistic vision'. But, I have to admit, that for me the vision often comes later on. Take this picture for example; on the screen I had a technically good, full colour, picture but it just wasn't doing anything for me. My initial vision to capture the wind-swept emptiness, had come up short.

Then I decided to make it a black and white and darken the blue sky. Suddenly it ceased to be a picture about water and sky and became one about horizon-less tones of light and dark, and cloud shapes that reflected a wind swept tree. Finally split toned with hints of blue and yellow and it became a moody, surrealistic, landscape which echoed the, windswept, desolate feeling that I experienced that day at the Waipara River Mouth. 

Perhaps it has less to do with 'vision' and more to do with 'emotion'; recreating emotion is not just about capturing visual components but presenting them in a way that elicits the appropriate emotional response.

It seems to me to be a picture that needs a large canvas ...

Are you in the haystack?

Yesterday I read a plaintive G+ post by +Vivienne Gucwa, lamenting how difficult it was to monetize her photography on line. Her words resonated with me and got me thinking about my own on-line experience and the conclusion I had come to, that the internet was not the best place for a photographer to sell work. (It might be one way for a photographer to sell themselves, but that is a different thing.)

It’s basically very simple – photographers make pictures and pictures are brought by customers. Where are the customers; are they on-line looking for work to buy? Generally, no they are not. Customers are out buying pictures in shops and galleries (I’m not talking about commercial buyers of stock photos here). My own experience is that potential customers may well want to look through your portfolio on line but, unless they have had some prior physical contact with your work they are unlikely to buy there. Pictures are real tangible things, physical size matters (small or large), presentation matters, how it looks in your hand or hung on a wall matters – these things are hard to judge on a computer screen. Some of my best selling pieces, don’t even look like my best work when displayed on a computer. Lastly, even I wouldn’t buy a picture on line without seeing it physically, so why would I expect anyone else to?

I am not a Luddite. My own internet presence includes a personal website, a blog and profiles at redbubble, 500px, Facebook and G+. I invite people to look at my work online but I don't try to sell to them there. My personal portfolio site has this on the front page, “This site is for looking; not buying. Should you have an overwhelming desire to purchase an image, please visit my portfolio at ...”

Nearly all my work is sold through a small rural gallery. Maybe I will expand my outlets further down the track but I have been selling cards and framed pictures every month this year from a location that has less than 500 physical visitors per week and displays work by a large number of artists. In the same period I have had one internet sale - because one of my existing ‘fans’ had seen a picture they liked on my Facebook page.

Here's another strange thing; my pictures can be brought on-line as greeting cards for about $2.50 each. I have sold absolutely none through this method. Instead, I buy them myself on-line and sell them through the gallery at $7.00 each. On average I have 2-3 card sales a week; not enough to pay the bills, but it's money for little effort - I just have to keep the shelves stocked - and I am learning what people like and what they don't.

The takeaway for me is that the internet is a great place to showcase what you can do and it’s the best way to get your portfolio ‘out there’ and available to any eyeballs that may want to see it. It’s a great place to share and discuss your work with other photographers; it’s also a great place to spend the time you should be using to make pictures! BUT it’s not a great place to meet real customers and sell your pictures – for that, the old fashioned ways are significantly more successful. As I heard a photographer say once, "Ah, redbubble (or any other large art web site) another haystack to hide your needle in."

Ben Heine

I came across Ben Heine's work through a Facebook post and a visit to his 500px page. His "Pencil vs Camera" series are really interesting:
 
But Ben works in quite a few different styles each of which he seems to have mastered in a amazing way. These are a couple of his "Digital Circlism" portraits:

and here is a video of the making of "Elvis":

Arts in Oxford - April exhibition

Monday, we finished preparing the gallery for the April exhibition - "A Vast View" - paintings by Maree White and Adrienne Ranson. If you can't make it to Oxford you can take a virtual tour here: http://www.fords.co.nz/pano/AIO_April_12/AIO_April_FG.html (don't forget to click through to the back gallery where the main exhibition works are).

I always enjoy hanging an exhibition; it's a great opportunity to meet new artists and hanging an exhibition is a great way to collaborate with a small team - a necessary break from working alone.

First folio on sale

Today I delivered my first limited edition folio to the gallery. Ten art pictures of Lyttelton Port packaged in the Dane Creek folio covers and now on sale at Arts in Oxford.

I've always focused on individual pictures before, but found the process of putting together a themed folio both challenging and rewarding; presenting a new dimension to story telling that goes beyond the individual image.   It will be interesting to see the response from gallery visitors but, regardless of that, I am really comfortable with what I have been able to produce so far and look forward to developing other multi-image projects in the days ahead.

See the rest of the folio here.

Rediscovering the opalotype

Photographic history is littered with now obsolete processing methods, like the cyanotype or the daguerreotype. One of the advantages of today's digital darkroom is being able to revisit some of these processes without needing to acquire specialist materials and chemicals and engage in strange rituals in darkened rooms. One such process that I am really enjoying is the opalotype.

Opalotypes were produced on milky white glass plates and the resulting monochrome image was then hand tinted to produce pictures that were (according to Wikipedia) "close to watercolour or even pastel in its softer coloring and tender mood." I suspect that it is probably this quality that draws me to the effect for certain subjects; like the Old Iron Bridge near Twizel in South Canterbury .

What do you think of the opalotype; nice and subtle or too last, last, century?

Spotlight on Stonegrooves

Every month we take down one exhibition and hang another. If I get a chance, I like to grab a few pictures from each exhibition - mainly for my own records. This last exhibition included work by Ruth Killoran an artist from Christchurch who is both a sculptor and a painter. This picture is taken through one of Ruth's sculptures towards one of her pictures.

I was fascinated by the abstract lines and shapes and the contrast with the rectangular painting. None of which shows off Ruth's work to best advantage of course, so if you want to see the beautiful work she creates, hop on over to her website at: http://www.stonegrooves.co.nz.