Lately I’ve been having far too much fun playing with layers in Photoshop.
It’s not like I didn’t know that layers existed, or even that I haven’t used them before. (I have, back when I used to use Photoshop in my work for ITS Customer Communication.) For some reason, though, I have felt a lot more creative lately in the kinds of pictures I’ve been experimenting with — and a bit braver about trying out new solutions in finding ways to use older photos that I liked, but never quite liked enough.
The photo above is one of those older photos. I took it last year in Morro Bay, at the annual Cruisin event, which attracts hundreds of vintage cars from near and far. The difficulty with my photos from Cruisin was simply that anytime I got a picture of a cool car, it was overwhelmed by all the people and visual noise all around it. To solve that problem in this case, I simply used Photoshop to: (1) duplicate the photo to a second (underneath) layer, which I desaturated and swirled up heavily with a blur filter; and (2) remove the background from the color layer, leaving a transparent background that was filled in by the underlying greyscale layer. Voila! The car came to the fore, and the visual noise receded to the background.
I was pleased enough with the result that I’m planning to make a series out of the Cruisin photos, using this same technique (with perhaps some other interventions, depending on the picture).
In similar fashion, I’ve been taking some fairly ordinary photos from around here, as well as from some trips abroad, and making them a bit more interesting with layer masks. For instance, the scene below is well known to anyone who’s walked along the coast just north of Cayucos: the wreck of a fishing boat lying in the rocky shallows.
This boat has no doubt featured in tens of thousands of photos over the years; and no matter what angle each photographer has tried to take, it’s a good bet that the overwhelming majority of those images look pretty much the same (as was undoubtedly the case with my original photo).
By duplicating my original to a second layer in Photoshop, though, then treating that layer with a Glowing Edges filter and using a gradient mask to integrate it partially into the original, the boat now appears to be heading into a dark dreamscape. There is a sense of mystery and disquiet to the image that was not there before.
This photo, too, is the beginning of a set of images that will use similar effects.
So. There are some other directions I’ve been trying (including ones that use technicolor pelicans), and maybe I’ll share some of those going forward. At any rate, like a certain cinematic ogre, I now seem to have developed layers. Suddenly I have a yen for parfait.
Ronald Crittenden 