And so..after spending nearly 8 hours on a different composition out of the flowers of the rosemary photograph, I couldn't get it just right, but knew something was there. I couldn't let it go, despite intending to. Took out another copy of the flowers alone, (I am learning slowly the benefit of keeping copies of every major step and component) extracted off the rosemary bush and in an hour and half ended up with the following piece of work. Of course, the hours and hours of pixel level extraction off the photograph I guess should be included in the time. Anyway, it just goes to show, art is a living thing, it can't be forced and once loosed, it flows smoothly. Not a bad result I don't think after the hours of frustration not knowing what I was looking for. I felt rather as a painter, a sculpture all of it, in search of the hidden treasure. That is how I approach this.

Original photo taken yesterday afternoon.....


rosemary by -jorden, on Flickr

Unexpected surprise....


rosemary flower composition by -jorden, on Flickr

Edit: By the way...I was amazed, astounded as I worked late last night at the pixel level...at the colors within what seems to be a simple light light blue flower...bold blues and greens, oranges and reds, I learned a lot about the colors within nature last night.

Woooooooow! Amazing and astounding is right. What terrific results. I love experimenting around to see what I can come up with. If you could ever figure out a simpler way it would definitely call for a tutorial or at the very least, a quick run thru on how to do it.

Great job.

Heck, I've never even seen rosemary in bloom and certainly didn't realize it was so georgeous.

I know..from a normal distance..they just seem like bland little clumps of flowers. This was very eye-opening for me and I look forward as things come into bloom etc to finding more of the simplistic complexity within the world around us.

And if it would be worthwhile, I'll try to recap what it is I did.

Not many folks on right now but just wait till mornin' and check out how many posts you get. Yeah, Spring's my favorite time of year too.

Gotta go eat some nachos...

later.

Well, here my ramble of trying to recap what I did. I am not sure it will make much sense but at the end I do recap what the main ingredients were needed in order to get here.

When digging for treasures, I'll be honest, a lot of times I go through Gegl and GMIC and just see what works and doesn't until I get led into a direction.

On the above pictures, I took the original photo and using the Select by color tool (oh and adding an alpha channel) starting grabbing the green of the rosemary bush to delete it being careful to watch as there is also some very light green in the flower stems I wanted to keep. This only gets rid of the huge bulk of the green. Then I zoom in real close and with the eraser begin trimming and cleaning everything up until all I had left was the flowers themselves. I used the unsharp mask (after checking different sharpening filters) as it gave me a better result for this particular project and it made even more dynamic some of the subtle colorings within the flower. I also had to hand fill in some blank spaces to join the cluster together that originally had been covered by rosemary twigs.

I had hoped to use transparent flood fill surrounding the flower, but this time it just didn't work, perhaps the flower was to complicated this time vs the marigold but after an hour of tweaking I had to give up on it. I spent about 2.5 hours and three attempts of 800% zoom of going meticulously around all the edges removing bold colors that were making too sharp of an edge. This was done with the paint brush on 1, so you are working very small. Finally after hours on clean up I had a nice smooth cluster on a transparent background. (I found as working and running different filters, I ended up doing this cleaning up, trimming, smoothing many many times throughout the hours I worked on it. Putting color behind to find stray colored pixels out in the transparency that weren't visible until brought out by the background etc)

Then I was trying to figure out what the cluster was calling for, how to present it. I originally was attempting to put it on one of Drac's sparkle backgrounds, I in fact still have a back up of it on there, but it was missing something that I could not put my finger on. I added some floral swirls and it was close..but it still was falling flat to me. I hope to yet finish that one if I can figure out what one last detail it needs for it to feel complete.

So I close it down and open up just the cluster on transparent, oh wait! I forgot something. I had done a drop shadow upon the cluster and was pleasantly surprised to see not a black shadow but it dropped some of the bush as the shadow and faded it out nicely. I still must admit I don't know how it did that. So my cluster is the flowers and a small faded shadow of the greenery.

I copy this layer then, run a color boost on it which pulls out way more blue, overlay it and I get a nice definition to the cluster. Playing around some more, trying this and that I find that the Gegl noise reduction took out some of the noise I wasn't liking yet left the color definition so I do that on each cluster layer, copy the layer once again and rotate it so that the are in the positions above, making a nice little oval type shape? and I blend on a layer below them Dark 1 from the top left corner to bottom right corner on linear. I lowered the opacity on the two cluster layers but as they layers were moved around not centered, there was a very distinct line at each layers border. So again I copy the layers and make another new image which enables me to go in and soften & smudge the lines to try and hide them (yet leaving the original or by this time back up of a back up) and eventually the distinct straight line is hardly visible and blends in with the picture.

I double bordered it twice with the Eg double border cutting around the bottom shadow and making another new image. Unfortunately, I played with so many filters, I know I did not mention them all, some worked and I'd back them out and some did, so I'd keep the result, or down the line I'd go back to the beginning and start again. It's all in how it feels, at least for me but basically you are isolating, sharpening, smoothing, copying then setting it atop a blended gradient.

I know this isn't exactly a tutorial, as the whole picture was hit and miss...(alot more misses than hits) but will try to keep better track of things in the future when I present a piece on here.

Those are gorgeous.
And thanks for sharing how you got the results.

I can not wait for Spring to get here.