Again I had great fun with Bren of Brashley photography’s Twirling Tuesday challenge. You should pop over to her site to see the lovely mandala like art she made from a yellow rose. It is always amazing to see what pops out of a fairly standard picture when one starts to play.
I’ve been having tremendous fun ever since I discovered twirling, many thanks to Bren of Brashley Photography and her Twirling Tuesday. In addition to just plain fun, it’s been a great help as I try to come to grips with the blend modes in the GIMP (they are the same in Photoshop). It is amazing how many different effects one can get from one photo.
Taking this photo of a peachy-orange deciduous azalea:
The two spun up layers are these:
Using different blend modes there are a stunning number of very different effects, here are some examples:
Then layering the original onto the different blended spirals using different blend modes you can get even more effects, including these rather trippy ones:
I find it fascinating, fun and rather relaxing to take a picture and see how many different looks I can get.
If you want to give it a try Bren’s post has directions for doing the twirling in Photoshop and my post Putting a twist on it using the GIMP has directions for using the GIMP (which is open-source=free).
But in the case of this rose that’s not a bad thing.
This is an English rose in a neighbor’s garden. It’s blooming a bit earlier than most this year.
A little late for Brashley Photography’s Twirling Tuesday.
For Brashley Photography’s Twirling Tuesday. If you are interested in trying out this fun Bren’s post has directions for doing the twirling in Photoshop. My post Putting a twist on it using the GIMP, describes how to twirl using the GIMP, an open source (free) photo processing program.
I’ve been using Brashley Photography’s Twirling Tuesday to experiment with the different blend modes for layers. Playing with the bright spring colors is more fun than reading the technical descriptions.
Directions for doing the twirling effect in Photoshop are in the Brashley Photography Post. If you use GIMP, like I do, this post: Putting a twist on it using the GIMP, explains how to do it.
Blending with the original picture:
For Brashley Photography’s Twirling Tuesday. It’s a lot of fun you should give it a spin!
This week for Brashley Photography’s Twirling Tuesday I used a daffodil. They are popping out all over these days.
I used the GIMP, a shareware program (free) to do this manipulation. If you are interested the directions for doing this effect are in this post: Putting a twist on it using the GIMP.
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:
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.
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.
If you wanted you could repeat this again.
I made a copy of the step 3 layer and applied Filters>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch using the default settings to get this:
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).
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:
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.
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