Werribee Park revisited

After a long period of silence, I've decided to update this blog again. I've been more involved with my Olympus E-510 and Facebook , so I decided to leave this blog for a while..

I went to Werribee park in January this year, but I decided to pay another visit just to take photos with my slr. Previous post here

I stumbled upon this website that gave some photoshop techniques. Its pretty cool

Steps

1. Duplicate your picture layer by dragging the layer to the ‘new’ icon in the layers palette (ctrl+j).

2. Apply a gaussian blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur…). Blur it enough that the detail disappears but the shapes mostly keep their form.

3. In the layers palette, change the blending mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Overlay.’ If you look at the before and after, you can see that this method makes the light tones lighter and the dark tones darker while softening it a touch. Basically, it softly boosts the contrast. If you want a more dramatic effect, try changing the blending mode to ‘Vivid Light’ instead of ‘Overlay.’

The original

The edited version

This picture almost looks a HDR (high dynamic range) image. Personally as an experimentation process, its interesting, but I wouldn't want to do this to all of my images.

Try it for yourself, and enjoy! More pics to come later.