My amaryllises are still going strong, but I think this may be their last hurrah for the year. The three bulbs have been providing cheer continuously since the beginning of December. I’m not generally a great lover of red but the weather has been cloudy and I’ve really been enjoying the different shades of red and the way the light plays on the petals.
You can see the buds in the lower left corner. The first shall be last.
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.
This picture seems to radiate out from the center of the flower. I thought it might make an interesting twirl.
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
Same settings as for step 2 were used.
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:
Whirled and pinched.
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).
A negative spin on it.
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:
Lighten only blend mode.Addition blend mode.
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.
My first amaryllis bloom opened this morning. A welcome cheerful note on this gray day.
A cheerful red on a gray day.
I got a group of three amaryllis for holiday cheer. Of course one of them has to be an over-achieving show-off… But in an amaryllis it’s cheerful and charming!
We are getting ready to have some work done in our kitchen and living room and I have to relocate a lot of sh..tuff. I took a load down to my son’s room (he currently lives in China so his room tends to wind up full of things that actually belong elsewhere when events like remodeling happen.
I walked in with my load of books and saw this:
Two amaryllis bulbs that I have saved from Christmases past had decided to put on a show. On forgets in the off season what gorgeous flowers they have (most of the year they are just leaves.
