Bryce Canyon National Park Antique Landscape Digital Art

Yesterday I took some time away from my Earth as Art book project to do some experimenting with image processing and converting a digital photo into digital art.
Specifically I took one of my photographs of Bryce Canyon and by using a somewhat convoluted workflow produced what I will call a digitally painted image.

I use the term digitally painted here in a different vein than I normally do. As a rule, when I describe one of my artworks as having been digitally painted it is because the image was created by my using either a mouse or Wacom Intuos tablet stylus or a combination of the two to directly apply color to a digital canvas. Quite frequently this painting involves the use of one of the generative brush engines I created so that the effects of my brush strokes are amplified.
However, in this case I've decided to use the phrase digitally painted to apply a label to a photograph that has been manipulated (post-processed) by a series of global image processing actions to create an image that is non-photographic.

The Image Processing Software Used

In producing Bryce Canyon National Park Antique Landscape I used three different graphics programs:

• Rawtherapee
• G'MIC
• Adobe Photoshop CS4

While I am a relative newcomer to RawTherapee I hold it in high regard because of its capabilities. Rawtherapee is a wonderful and powerful alternative to Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Lightroom, and Darktable as a processor of camera raw data. In addition to being open source, Rawtherapee is also available for those of us running Linux systems.

G'MIC (GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) is an open source image processing framework that is available as either a command line toolset, as a GIMP plugin, as a Krita plugin, or as an online image processing package. For those who prefer not doing command line work, I recommend using the G'MIC GIMP plugin. Like Rawtherapee, G'MIC is also available for Linux. (For the curious, I am running Ubuntu 17.10, aka Artful Aardvark.)

Lastly, Adobe Photoshop CS4 is my general workhorse in terms of performing global adjustments, layering, adding watermarks, sizing for the web, and adding text to images. In fact Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator have a lot to do with why I still use Windows 7 as an OS. While my version of Photoshop is quite out of date, it contains all the tools I need and none of the distracting elements that Adobe has added to Photoshop in order to turn it into a one-size-fits-all solution.

About Bryce Canyon National Park Antique Landscape

This work started as a photograph that I took while visiting Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. The effect I wanted to achieve was somewhere between that of an old colored etching and a color pencil drawing. I wanted the image to be bright with a low color saturation and evidence of pencil lines.

To achieve this effect I first opened the raw image in Rawtherapee and made a variety of adjustments there. These adjustments including enhancing contrast, increasing color saturation, and sharpening details. I next ran the Rawtherapee output through G'MIC a number of times, each time producing a different output file. I then combined all the files together in Photoshop and used a variety of adjustment layers and layer blends to create the final image.

If you are a person who works with digital photography and enjoys using a fair amount of post-processing work to substantially alter your original photograph, I would like to offer the following advice. If you ever want to reproduce an effect, be sure to thoroughly document every step of your workflow. Personally I fail at documenting what I do and consequently can not easily, if at all, reproduce the style of any particular workflow I previously employed.

Bryce Canyon on Redbubble

I've made Bryce Canyon National Park Antique Landscape available on a variety of products at Redbubble.com. You can see the products, which includes wall art prints, by either clicking on the product image above or the button below.

Bryce Canyon National Park Antique Landscape artwork on Redbubble

Availability of Original Canvas Print

Open edition prints of Bryce Canyon are available as wall art on Redbubble. The largest size canvas or photographic print available from Redbubble is 30 by 18 inches. However, until a print is sold on Redbubble I can offer an original 40 by 24 inch gallery wrap canvas print or a 36 by 24 gallery wrap canvas print in a float frame which will come with a certificate of authenticity. Once someone buys the original print, all wall art options will be pulled from Redbubble and no other print copies will be produced – insuring that the purchaser has the one and only canvas print. This is a limited time offer because once a print sells on Redbubble, the offer of an original print will be rescinded. To clarify, there will be either a single original print or multiple open edition prints in a variety of sizes.

To learn more about purchasing an original canvas print, please contact me

 

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2018 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Art and Artists, Digital Art, Graphics Software, Product Art.