This was an extremely stressful weekend, but successful nevertheless. I spent most of the time programming and researching technical problems. I’m going to blog about that on my programming blog soon.
It’s Sunday night now, I am on the train to Vienna, and this is an image that I took on a short excursion this afternoon. It’s a merge of three exposures from a series of seven bracketed pictures.
There was wind, the small twigs were moving, and even though I tried my best (just as Photoshop’s align function did), there were some mis-alignments. Contemplating my options I tried Topaz Clean, and there an effect that I probably have not used a single time. It’s one of those fractal algorithms, that turn your image into a curly pattern. See on their web site, it’s what they call “Unique and Stylized Edge Manipulation”.
Well, it works. Of course it’s a canned effect (although you do have some control), but - interestingly enough - it tends to look pretty natural, at least from a distance and at the sizes that I show on the web. At 100% it looks … interesting, and I guess it would look pretty good in a print.
The Song of the Day is “Broken Bricks” from the 1999 self-titled White Stripes debut album. Hear it on YouTube.