A very popular place to take a picture in Chicago’s Millennium Park is at the Cloud Gate sculpture, frequently referred to as “The Bean”. The surface allows for a lot of fun reflections of people and the surrounding area. The challenge with taking a photo in a popular tourist destination is that everyone has seen it, so what are you bringing to the conversation that is new? I took a bunch of photos, including some that are just snapshots of the family to serve as reminders of our stay. But I wanted to try something a bit different and abstract too. This past week in my Photoshop class we covered the oil paint filter and I thought that might be a fun one to try. Here is my edited version:
When I was first looking at my original image, I wanted to clean it up a bit. Since it is an outdoor sculpture, it has a lot of stray marks and dirt on it. I used the clone stamp tool to tidy it up a bit. Then I went to Filter-Oil Paint. Here is a screen capture of the settings I used:
After I did that, I sharpened it a bit using the High Pass filter. To do that first flatten your image, then make a duplicate layer. Then Filter-Other-High Pass. I set it to 4 pixels then changed the blending mode of the layer to soft light. Then I ran the Oil Paint Filter again, using the same settings to intensify the look. I decided I liked the effect of running it twice.
Here is the original image:
So, my final image is a bit abstract, but do you like it? Questions about my process? feel free to leave them below. This look isn’t hard to create, and has a lot of creative applications in my opinion. Been to see “The Bean” in Chicago and wrote a post about it? Used the Oil Paint filter and wrote a post about it? Feel free to leave a comment with a link to what you have done.
Cheers!