Rugged Maine Coast

[FrankMi]

Hi Frank I googled Thomas Kinkade and saw some of his paintings on the internet. I like them because I like different styles in art. IMO if you want to make your images look like Thomas Kinkade's paintings, you need to add some blur to your images. I added a glamour glow filter to your second image in Color Efex Pro 4 to get a closer look to Thomas Kinkade's style, would you like to see it?

I'd love to see your edit Binnur! Please feel free to post it.

I realize that a painting can't record the detail of a photograph so by comparison, even a painting of a photograph will always look blurry by comparison.

The aspect of Kinkade's artistry that I would like to improve in my images is his use of light to call attention to the details that captivates an eye flow in a composition. I can't create the compositions using actual scenes that he could from his mind's eye, but perhaps I can learn from his use of lighting and style of imagery.

[bnnrcn]

Here is the edit Frank. I didn't care about the saturation, you can adjust it to your taste anyway, I just want to show the effect of the filter. IMO it might go well with soft faded colors

[FrankMi]

Yup, a bit saturated. I'd agree Binnur. I'm not sure if it is much softer but the dynamic exposure range certainly is wider. I've got to get back and apply the suggestions and repost.

[FrankMi]

OK. I had a chance to contemplate the editing suggestions and try to apply them. It is sometimes difficult, after playing with an image for a while, to be rationally objective so I honestly can't tell at this point if I went too far... or, perhaps... didn't go far enough.

It was pointed out that the sky was commanding too much attention away from the rest of the scene so in this edit it was subdued but perhaps could have been made even more bland.

There was too much foreground and given the vibrant colors, needed to be reduced by almost half.

The fisherman's buoy that was washed upon the rocks was a bright white, a very small, but a relatively noticeable eye catcher. Rather than clone it out, I dirtied it up to reduce it's visual impact.

I thought long and hard about the lighting on the rocks, and although it might look more realistic to dull them back down, I felt that this was the part of the image that caught the imagination of the viewer and so I left it pretty much alone.

My goal with this image was to explore how to use Dodge and Burn to being out the beauty in the scene, much as it was used in Thomas Kinkade's oil paintings so even if this is not great, it is hopefully a milestone in my quest for images of this type, to be an artistic painter of photographic light.



Did I go too far? Not far enough? Is this edit now a bit closer to being a compelling image to view?

Comments and critiques welcomed!

[FootLoose]

I think cropping the foreground has worked, Frank. The rock is now the main focus of attention for me. It looks like you have brightened that area too. However, I also think you could still reduce the brightness of those flowers a bit. There is plenty of detail in them to be explored after the main subject, but at the moment they are stilling pulling my eye away from the rock texture.

PS I just had a look at a couple of Kincaid's paintings. If you want to give your image that glowy look, you could try adding a gaussian blur layer - about 15px to experiment with - and blend using overlay or softlight mode. Then paint it in or out to your taste.

[bnnrcn]

Hi Frank, I like the edit and I agree with Greg about adding some blur to the image

[Downrigger]

Did I go too far? Not far enough?

This edit is pretty interesting, Frank, but despite my preference for its predecessor, my thought is that there would certainly be many points of view on your question and the opinion that should matter the most to you is yours. Others' critiques and suggestions might best be thought of as means to refine your image towards your own vision for it, not change that vision. And I think your vision is clearly interesting and appealing.

[FrankMi]

This edit is pretty interesting, Frank, but despite my preference for its predecessor, my thought is that there would certainly be many points of view on your question and the opinion that should matter the most to you is yours. Others' critiques and suggestions might best be thought of as means to refine your image towards your own vision for it, not change that vision. And I think your vision is clearly interesting and appealing.

Hi Binnur and Mark. I apologize for not responding to you here sooner.

I have followed up on these suggestions and tried to more clearly delineate what my goals were for this style of landscape image in the posting dealing with the post processing background in the Project 52 thread.