First Steps: Crop and Simplify
Posted on Aug 2, 2011 | 0 comments
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
Henry David Thoreau
US Transcendentalist author
(1817 – 1862)
When you set out to turn a photo into artwork, you should start by taking a critical look at the picture. There is a difference between what an artist would include in the scene and what a photographer might have captured. Start by considering a different cropping to make the picture more interesting. You may have wanted to crop the original but worried that the result would be too low a resolution. That won’t be a factor now. In fact, any blurring of the picture might enhance the resulting artwork.
Next, consider simplifying the picture. An artist doesn’t paint everything he sees. Is that antenna on the roof really necessary? What about that man walking across the scene? Would an artist really include that No Parking sign? Can you make a modern scene look older by removing some modern features? Photoshop makes it easy to remove these unnecessary details. You can use the Clone Stamp tool or the Healing Brush. With CS5 it’s even easier using Content Aware Fill.
Let’s have a look at a recent example. Click on the pictures to open up a larger copy.
Here’s the original photo of the Hudson River on a foggy day in February. The picture was taken using my iPhone and really isn’t a great shot. I had wanted to try SilverFX Pro and thought this would make an interesting picture to experiment on. I started by straightening the horizon. I didn’t want the ship in the final picture but I waited because I wanted to change the composition anyway. Once I cropped the picture it became a moot point. However, after I zoomed in and cropped the picture, the lamp post in the middle with its large sign became a serious distraction.
Here’s the cropped photo. This brings the focus in to the foggy water. It also gives the picture a timeless feeling. As mentioned above, the only change I needed was to remove the distracting lamp post that ended up in the center of the picture after the crop.
And this is the final result after processing with SilverFX Pro.
As you can see, even a small amount of up-front work can go a long way. Now let’s look at a photo that presents a bigger challenge.
This is a photo that was offered to the DigitalNuts Yahoo group to be turned into artwork. The original photo is from Laura Shreck and is available through
stock.xchng. The biggest problems with this photo are the electrical lines, poles and transformers. No painter would have included them. If I had it to do over again, I might crop a bit more off the bottom to keep the train from being at the exact center of the picture. Oh, well.
The painting is much simpler without the details. The eye can concentrate on the train and the height of the mountain without stumbling over the wires running across the original. I didn’t have to be as careful with the removal of the wires and the poles as I normally would have been because the painting would lose all the detail anyway. There’s another thing leaving in the details does. It makes it obvious that the original was a photo and the painting isn’t a real painting.
So take the time to simplify your photo before you turn it into a work of art. It’s worth the effort and you should consider it a normal part of the process.
