I admire the work of both Bren of Brashley Photography and Julie Powell. I’ve learned a lot from them. This morning Bren posted a “Twirling Tuesday Challenge”. It intrigued me, but the directions (written by Julie Powell) were for Photoshop.
Being an amateur on a fixed income I haven’t sprung for the Adobe Photoshop software. I wondered if I could create a similar effect in the GIMP. GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It is shareware, which means the price right.
A bit of internet research and experimentation today led me to this process:
Step 1: Load my photo.
Step not taken:
Both Julie Powell’s directions and the video on Brashley photos post use a Photoshop filter in the pixelate menu called “mezzotint”. The GIMP doesn’t have that choice near that in its pixelize filter. There is a GIMP plug in to get the effect, but I decided to see what would happen without that step. I was in the mood to play with pretty things, not be a computer geek..maybe next week.
Step 2: Zoom Motion Blur
Filters>Blur>Zoom motion blur. I moved the center to the middle of the flower and cranked the blurring factor up to 0.515 and left the other parameters at default.
Step 3: Repeat step 2
If you wanted you could repeat this again.
Step 4: A positive spin on it
I made a copy of the step 3 layer and applied Filters>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch using the default settings to get this:
Step 5: A negative spin on it
I mad another duplicate of the step 3 image, moved it above the layer from step 4, and again used the Filter>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch, but for this layer I made the angle negative (I forgot to jot down the exact number, but I think it was around -200).
Step 6: Experiment with blend modes
Not much to say about this, I just tested all of the various blend modes on the layer made in step 5 until I found ones I liked. Here are my two favorites:
Summary
It was fun to give this a try and the GIMP was quite easy to use to get the twirled effect. So much so that I may become addicted to abstraction.
XingfuMama 
I love what you came up with and enjoyed your final creation – the final outcome reminded me of glass art! Was shocked to see it come from that flower – good work!
And side note – for years my hubs offered to teach me photoshop but I never wanted to spend the time learning – the intro lessons I did have were just too complicated for my mood and interest – feel a little lazy to say that – but oh well.
Anyhow – was wondering how much time and effort was spent using the software you chose for this creation?
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I think I took about an hour once I gave up trying to find something on the internet to guide me and started using my head.
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That sounds reasonable amount of time for art exploring 😉
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I find it relaxing sometimes to do that sort of exploration.
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😉
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So fascinating. 😍
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Thank you.
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Nice. Thanks.
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Wow, really good!
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Thank you.
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WOW… this is great … thank you for joining in the challenge. I hope you don’t mind me asking.. is there a chance you could write down abbreviated instructions and send it to me at brashley.photography@outlook.com so I can include it, with courtesy to you, with my post for people who use GIMP and link it back to your blog post. x
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wow this is so cool.. great work
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Thank you.
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This is great! I’ve never used GIMP, maybe I should give it a try (I’ve used an old version (6) of Paint Shop Pro for years, but only to crop and resize images, have never really experimented with its other functions, maybe I’ll take a look at them and see if I can do this kind of transformation with it).
PS it’s really nice to see so many pingbacks here from Brashley Photography; I really love it when the blogging community works together 🙂
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I am unfamiliar with Paint Shop Pro, but if it has layer modes there is a very good chance you can achieve a similar effect.
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