© 2016 Thousand Word Images by Dustin Abbott

When a photo to painting transformation works and when it doesn’t

I got up early to go out and shoot landscapes. A storm front was slowly moving into our region, and the day itself dissolved into cold, torrential rain. The morning was beautiful, though, with complete stillness across the massive Ottawa River that divides Ontario and Quebec . There were wonderfully expressive clouds above. The sun quickly hid, but I was left with nicely lit, beautifully flowing clouds that looked as if the sky were brushed in by the hand of God.

I took two exposures. One for the sky, so that the highlights would not be blown out. The second was for the distant shoreline, so that I would not lose the shadow detail there. I combined these through a far less extreme process from early HDR that left me with a nice, natural looking image.

Clearly this was a lovely photo just as it was, but I wanted to add more drama with a few coloring tweaks. I took the image into Exposure to see what I could do.

I had been working on some monochrome shots, so I happened to have a panel of monochrome oriented presets opened. A custom look based on the FSA Red Bleach preset that I had developed caught my eye. I tweaked it to a fairly low intensity (52%) and added some warming and sharpness. The end result was an image that really added extra flavor to the sky and gave the shoreline more of an autumnal feel. I really liked the result.

© 2016 Thousand Word Images by Dustin Abbott

It was right then that I saw Snap Art written all over this photo. The fabulous “brushstrokes” in the sky were already very painterly, and I now had a fabulous color palette that looked more “art” than photograph. I immediately took the image into Snap Art.

One of the things that I love most about Snap Art is the ability to easily control the nature of the brushstrokes. Often, I want to add the effect of longer brush strokes to create a more painterly look, but in this case the image already had naturally long, flowing movement in the clouds. Overdoing the brushstrokes in this photo would actually detract from the sky instead of adding to it. It needed a subtle touch, and fortunately the customizable nature of the software allows for that.

I started with an oil paint preset but adjusted the stroke length down. The color variation control remained high in order to add some painterly complexity to the color. I wasn’t happy with the loss of detail in the far shoreline, though, as I felt that component was a strength of the image. To combat that, I turned the photorealism slider way up. It gave a look like that of highly detailed landscape painters.

© 2016 Thousand Word Images by Dustin Abbott

Thanks to the texture of Snap Art, I now had what looks like a detailed oil painting on canvas.­ What made this work look so nice was an instinct honed through use of what works in Snap Art…and what doesn’t. The end result doesn’t feel forced or contrived, but is what I would call a natural use of this amazing software. Not everything is going to work in Snap Art, but learning when “to paint or not to paint” is part of what being an artist means in the digital age.