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.
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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