A Surreal New York New York Hotel
Not sure what possessed me to create this, but it was a lot of fun. This is not really a hard effect to achieve. Just made some basic Lightroom adjustments so my image had nice tones and detail. In Photoshop, added a little Lucis Pro (no longer available) to sharpen it just a little more – could have used Topaz (see sidebar for website link) Detail or Clarity to do this. Had to do quite a bit of clean up since there is there is a roller coaster running in front of the New York New York Hotel in Las Vegas. On a stamped layer (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E), added a pretty severe motion blur by going to Filter -> Blur -> Motion Bur and setting the Angle to -90 (vertical effect for this image) and the Distance to 687. Added a duplicate layer of the Lucis Pro layer on top of the blur layer and a Black Layer Mask – the buildings were lightly painted back to give some building effect but still left it really vague. Another stamped layer was used and the now free Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 was opened. Started with a preset and tweaked the sliders to get a pleasing effect. On a duplicate layer, the Flaming Pear Flood filter was added that gave a bit more of an eerie look – the lines in the bottom foreground came by selecting a Glue called spin light – thought it was an interesting effect. On another stamped layer used Topaz Texture Effects 2 using the Crisp Morning Run – did a lot of adjustments and used the Spot Mask a couple times, once on the Texture section and another in the Masking section. Added a Red Channel Luminosity Curve Adjustment Layer. On another stamped layer above used Nik Viveza 2 to add focus to the guitar on the building. Used a Selective Color Adjustment Layer to give that final color look to get the sort of soft abstract effect. This was a lot of fun to try something different……Digital Lady Syd
A Reflecting Wood Stork
I guess this is what birds do when they are reflecting on their lives. Hum… Anyway, just the different iteration of an image I posted in my Fun Photoshop Blog recently (see How to Get the Most Out of Your “Not-So-Great” Images blog). I wanted to show how interesting it can be to change up an image just by running the same filter effect twice on the it. I used the same settings from my linked blog for the Flaming Pear Flood filter and Topaz (see sidebar for website link) Detail 3 using the same Soft Leaves preset. But this time the same Detail filter was applied twice using the same preset to get this sort of dreamy, natural effect. It gave the image a totally different feel. So this is just another example of how to change the ordinary to extra-ordinary!…..Digital Lady Syd
