One of the things I love about digital photos is the way you can easily manipulate the images. I almost never post a photo straight out of the camera.  There’s always tweaking to be done.  It might be simply cropping the image for maximum effect, straightening a crooked image, correcting the color, contrast, brightness, etc.  Even beyond making a photo look it’s best, you can easily make a photo look totally different. This is a perfect example.

The other day I returned a book to the Algoma Public Library and on my way in I noticed a group of hollyhocks.  My artist’s eye thought that would be a good image to experiment on.  I liked the colors and the texture of the stone wall behind them.  To the right is the original photo I snapped.  I left myself plenty of room to crop it.  When I look at the original, I really don’t see anything particularly special about these flowers.

I opened the image in Photoshop and tweaked the brightness and contrast, cropped it, then saved it.  I then opened up another image editing software called FotoSketcher.  It’s a free program I recently found and am just starting to play with. It allows you to convert a digital photo to a variety of different art styles, such as pencil sketch, oil pastel, watercolors, etc.  It also has a number of options for aging a photo, increasing saturation and adding a frame or text.

I imagine any real artist who works with oils would probably snicker and scoff at this type of creation. Yet, if I were to actually pick up a paint brush or pastels, you’d get a lot of stick-people level images.  Not being familiar with those kind of mediums, I really don’t know what I’m doing with things like brush size, number of strokes, edge intensity and such, so I trust the software to do the heavy lifting.  There are a lot of adjustments the software allows you to make.  I just fiddle around until I find something that appeals to me.  A true artist, could probably do much better.

On the image above, I simply selected one of the oil painting modes and fiddled.

My artistic medium is digital photography, and I don’t expect that to change, but adding another digital twist to the images and a free tool to the digital tool box keeps things interesting.

If you’re interested in the FotoSketcher software (remember, it’s Free) you can down load it here: http://www.fotosketcher.com/

To see a larger version of the main image at the top of this post, simply click on it.