Article by Ey@el

Original en français

The following tutorial is based on Paint Shop Pro but may easily be adapted to any image editing software running on Windows and supporting .8bf filters such as Photoshop, GIMP, PhotoFiltre, etc.

Materials

- a preferably well-contrasted colour or b/w photo

- some free external filters to install into the Plugins folder of your image editing software before launching it:

Fluorizer

Split Contrast

Instructions

1. Open a copy of the image you wish to manipulate.

2. Apply Arithmetic :

    Image 1 = current picture
    Image 2 = current picture
    Function = Add
    Channel Image 1 = green
    Channel Image 2 = blue
    Divisor = 1
    Bias = 0

3. Apply Ormente - Fluorizer filter.

4. Apply UnPlugged - Split Contrast filter:

    Light = 39
    Dark = 128

5. With the Magic Wand (tolerance 10), select the sky then fill with white. Unselect.

6. Select the black areas of the trees using the Free Hand then press Delete.

8. Fill the erased zones by cloning some trees with the Cloning tool.

9. Enhance.

NOTE: The choice of colour channel may vary according to the original RGB colour cast of your picture. The external filters are optional and may be replaced by a combination of existing effects. The setting of Split Contrast may also need to be adjusted to your picture. Steps 5-8 may not apply to your chosen picture. Finally, to add a more realistic touch, I also applied a paper texture.

For the above portrait, I have used another (free) filter instead of Fluorizer (A head in the cloud from the Andrew's Filters series) and set Split Contrast to different values. The background was repainted using both standard brush and airbrush tools and I applied Gaussian noise to the overexposed zones of his jacket.

Ey@el

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