1616 - Broken Bricks


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.


There are 2 comments

Rick   (2011-03-21)

You've touched on the fact that you like to do your merges by hand, but have you tried Photoshops Merge-to-HDR - using the 'remove ghosts' options? I think it only appeared in CS5, along with a massive overhaul of the controls. Admittedly, I've only used it on an errant arm that encroached into a scene but it seemed to do a pretty good job.

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andreas   (2011-03-21)

Rick, I still use CS3, but what I've seen of such de-ghosting in Photomatix Pro or HDR Express would have failed on those twigs. Maybe CS5 does a better job, but then, I doubt it.

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