52:2013 Week 3

 

 

You would think that given I chose the 52 week theme for this week that I would have had something in mind - I hadn't! Yesterday we went to the Wings over Wairarapa airshow in Masterton and amongst the displays in the Defence Force area was this vehicle alongside a restored version. Here is the original shot which was constrained by it's surroundings:

Whilst an interesting vehicle the lack of contrast in the shot, plus the clutter made it rather flat and snap shot looking but I thought with a bit of work in Photoshop I could end up with something worthwhile.
Here are the steps I took to transform this image:
1. Cloned out the hand written sign on the front bumper/fender.
2. Cloned out the motorcycle and the open sided tent behind the vehicle.
3. Then the conversion to sketch, the settings will vary according to the image but you can Google tutorials for this technique. Here are the steps:

• I duplicated the background layer;
• Converted the copy to a smart object;
• Applied a Gaussian blur, enough to retain the detail;
• Changed blend mode to "Divide" - this gives the basic sketch look;
• Adjusted levels by moving the black slider to the right bring out the detail;
• Desaturated the images;
• Boosted contrast;
• Deselected the background layer and merged the visible layers;
• Reduced the opacity of the layer to bring back in some light colour to the image.

I like the overall result - I hope you do too!