Georgianne Giese
About the Image(s)
A couple weeks ago, the water lilies at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, SC, were in full bloom. We took a tour of the various water lily ponds there and had a glorious time photographing the lilies. I liked this one with the reflection, so decided to turn it into a photo painting.
As usual, my first step after Camera Raw, was to apply the NIK presets: Darken/Lighten Center, Detail Extractor, and Pro Contrast. Then I cleaned up the image a bit with Content Aware Fill and the Healing Brush.
Next step was to apply a texture by Painted Paper Texture Storm Anthology. It’s layer is at 51% opacity in Pin Light. But the flower got too blurred out, and that called for correction. I applied a mask and hid the texture over the flower and with a lighter opacity black paint, revealed a little more of some of the leaves, in various opacities for shading. Then I stamped up.
The flower was still not sharp enough for my liking, so I applied NIK Detail Extractor to the flower only. Still, I was not happy, as I wanted a more painterly effect. I applied NIK again and used both Darken/Lighten Center and Pro Contrast. That brought out more texture, but it still wasn’t ‘there’.
As a last resort, I went to Topaz Studio 2, chose Impression, and tweaked the brush and its settings until I got the image I craved! But, of course, it blurred out the flower again, so back in PS, I applied a mask and painted black over the flower, to bring back its previous radiance!
To emphasize the painterly effect, I duplicated the top layer and clicked on Filter > Other > High Pass. That produced a gray layer. I moved the slider until just the right amount of lines showed through, and put the layer in Overlay blend mode.
I hope you enjoy this lily image as much as I did. Please let me know if there are suggestions for improvement or changes.
This round’s discussion is now closed!
6 comments posted
In my opinion, even with all your efforts, I feel that the lily flower has been lost in the shuffle. I have not tried adding textures to a dark background, so no helpful thoughts there. Instead, I wondered about a different crop and enhancing the flower, especially the center, as an alternative starting point for your processing.   Posted: 09/04/2021 10:08:18
However I did feel the flower itself was a bit blown out, therefore getting a little lost in the image. So I brought this into Lightroom and reduced the highlights on just the flower and increased the white point just a bit to try to maintain a bit of the glow without blowing out the detail too much. Here's that result.
  Posted: 09/06/2021 07:11:28