We headed to the Fremont Older Open Space Preserve in Cupertino, CA on Saturday. It was a great day for a hike in the the Valley, 65 degrees and sunny! My research on the park all stated it was an easy hike, however, I don’t think they were taking pregnant women iton consideration. It was all up hill, Sarah was a real trooper through it all. However, we ended up turning around about a half mile into the hike as her heart rate was getting pretty up there.
While we were walking back through the trail I saw an awesome scene. So like any photographer awestruck by inspiration, I instinctively picked up my camera with absolutely no regard to my settings and snapped my rapid fire exposure set. I heard the last shot dragging on and thought, Damn that’s going to be blurry! Sure enough, it was.
The blurry image on the left almost appeared Monet-ish. So, instead of trashing the image, I applied Adobe Photoshop CS 5’s Pixel Blender to it. This filter is fun to play with, I say play lightly, as these Pixel Blender photos are interesting but not show worthy. It is a quick way to see an image from a different perspective but it is still the application of a single global filter. I don’t typically use single filters as a solution because it looks kiche, gaudy, and amateur. But this is the start to something, look at the image of my wife for example. For this image I used a series of filters to include pixel blender, a few blurs, and a lot of masking and manipulating. That is acceptable use of the filter, in my opinion.
For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
