Digital Fusion With a Pineapple, a Camera, and a Computer

Pineapple is so good to eat.  But have you ever photographed a pineapple?  Okay, so what's so special about photographing a pineapple? And what is this thing called "Digital Fusion?"

Well, let's start with the last question first.  "Digital Fusion" is what I call the art that I create using my camera and my computer, specifically my Corel Paint Shop X5 photo editing program.  Over the past years as I have progressed in this specialty, I have felt hard pressed to know what to call what I do.  It's photography, yet once I am finished creating, it doesn't look much like photography anymore.  It's not actually digital painting either.  I really enjoy cooking shows, especially Gordon Ramsay's shows, and one of the things I have learned from those shows is that when you mix different styles of cooking together, say Indian and Mexican for example, it is called "fusion."  So, one day I was thinking that what I do is totally digital since I use a digital camera and everything else is done on my computer, and I am definitely fusing different things together.  Hence, the name "Digital Fusion" came to my mind.  I don't know if anyone else has ever used that terminology before or not, but I know for myself, I finally feel that I have found the right name and description of my art.

So, okay then, what about this pineapple and what are you going to do with it?  Well, I 'm glad you asked.  Let me show you.

Starting with these 4 photos, let's see what happens when I start using Paint Shop with them.  First let me say that I have added a great many more filters that you can find online for free just by looking.  The filters are plug-ins that help me create the art I so enjoy.  I didn't really do anything with the photo of the actual pineapple...yet anyway.  But I wanted to show you the different colors available from the pineapple itself.  Mostly I worked with the photo of the leaves, and the bottom photo of the single segment of the side of the pineapple.  You can see more here.

These 3 examples above show the vast amount of color that was provided just by the one photo of the pineapple leaves.  Be sure to click on each photo to see it enlarged for better detail.  My favorite among these is the center one, which I call "Florets"


Next, let's take a look at examples of digital fusion using the single segments of the pineapple skin.  With the first one, I got these final pieces of art.

The second of the above examples is actually the cropped version of the first one so that the cross itself is the main focus.  I have been using a Kaleidoscope plug-in to try to come up with different styles of crosses, and this is just one of many examples.

Now let's move on to the final individual segment of pineapple skin.  It is more in focus and also has a larger variety of colors in the palette.  

 

As you can see from these 4 examples above, the colors can be changed during processing.  All of these kept the brick texture simply because I liked the look it presented.  

So, there you have it.  What I call "Digital Fusion" and why I call it that.  It doesn't matter what I might find to photograph to start with.  Everything has options to be used as a final digital fusion piece of art.  With God as the Master Painter, the color palette provided by nature cannot be topped.

It's Always Fun to Experiment

Today I am trying to learn different ways to make a photograph black and white but still leave a specific element of it in the original color.  Before anything else, I have to say that I am not using layers.  I don't know how.  Yeh I know, not good for a photographer, right?  Neither am I using photographs in RAW.   Why?  Well, so far, I haven't needed to do either one.  Every edited change I have made in any of my photographs have been done with an original JPEG file.  One day I hope to learn how to work with both RAW and layers, but that isn't today.

First a reminder that I am using Corel Paint Shop Photo Pro X5, or Paint Shop 15 as some prefer.  

Second, whenever I am attempting to try something new, I still find my way into experimentation with other things along the way.  

So, today, here is my step-by-step process.

Oh, another thing that is very important. These are not my photos.  They are my 12 year old granddaughter's photo.  She and I often work together as I am teaching her photography and as I learn new things, I show her too.

 

For this photo, I did not clear up the focus as I was merely attempting to see if I could remove all of the color except for the original color of the flower.  It worked somewhat, but it left the highlights in the black and white, or grey scale, rather than keeping them the original color.

For this next set, I cleaned up the focus of the original photo.  This time I wanted to try other options to see what would happen.  I am sure what I did on this one would have worked best using layers, as I never was able to come out with the original flower color.  But I did like the results just as they turned out.

 

 These next three results are interesting and show what happens when you separate the RBG color channels.  For these I stayed within the original Paint Shop 15 program, clicking on the Image tab.  Then I chose the Channel Splitter option and came up with these three photos at once.  

This one above was red.

This one above was green.

This one above was blue.


After this I tried several other filters still trying to come up with my desired results.  But as usual, I got distracted by the other experimental results as I tried the various filters.  I am still working with the Luminares filter group.  This first photo is Luminares: A Bit of Left Over Gradient.

Because I loved how these colors turned out, I wanted to do some other things.  All I did so far with this is to create several kaleidoscope variances from the Mehdi effects group.  These are the results.

I couldn't resist.  The colors are so beautiful.  I'm far from finished with learning how to change a photo from color to black and white while keeping one object in the photo the original color.  But for now, I'm being distracted by a dog that wants to go outside badly, and other family members wanting my attention.  Have a great day!  Or evening, whichever it may be for you where you live.

Facebook

Well, I put it off for awhile, but it was finally time to jump in and start swimming.  I've opened a Facebook page for Capirani Photography.  It is listed as Cynthia A. Pirani Photography.  Of course most of you already know that Capirani is simply my initials with my last name.  I think it makes it easier to remember one word than a whole name.  Anyway, the page is up and running.  So if you will please go over there and visit, click the LIKE button and help me get my first 100 likes, I would really appreciate it. 

One of my friends said this gorgeous star above would look awesome on top of a Christmas tree.  She suggested using a 3D printer to make it work.  Having never even seen how those things work, I can only guess at it.  But maybe it would work.  

In the meantime, I've been searching out some new filters for my PSP program so I can make some more interesting artwork.  It's been very interesting to find out what I can do with the new ones.  Many of them were difficult to get loaded into the program because they had so many files inside files inside files.  But all I had to do was to keep following the path and then moving the individual files to the main folder.  That was a bit time consuming but worth it.  The quality of designs I come up with are so much better than what I was doing before.  At least I think so.  Maybe it is just because I was using the old ones for so long.  Take a look at what I did with some photos of cabbage from this past July.  

A Granddaughter's Art and More

The other night I decided it was time to try out some new filters to see what I might be able to do with them.  After getting several installed, my granddaughter and I started playing around with some of her photos to see what effects we came up with.  She's 12 years old and has been greatly interested in learning photography and how to use editing programs to make her own photographic artwork.  The following photo is what she came up with on her own using one of her own photographs.  It's so good I just had to share it with you.  The original photo is of a sherbet glass and a small flower vase containing multicolored glass marbles.  She would love to hear your comments about her photo.

Since that night, I have started working on my own photos to see what I might come up with using these new filters.  Yes, I tried to use her special effects on my photos but so far they just do not look this good.  So I used my own choices with my photographs.  Here are the newest results.  You can also see them and other photographs on my new website. You can also see my work at Xanadu Gallery.

As much as I love making the kaleidoscopes, I might just end up not making many more.  Then again, who knows?

Abstract Tutorial--Step-by-Step

Tonight I would like to take you through the steps for making some interesting abstract designs, and by using a couple of really, really bad photographs to do it.  To start out, I want you to do something you will not understand at first.  I want you to take a couple photos of your hair, or the hair of someone else who will allow you to do so.  Now you can make this photo sharp and in focus, or only slightly focused.  In the case of this tutorial, it would be cool if you can photograph the hair against a colorful background such as a shirt.  

Okay, now stop laughing.  I'm serious here.  

In all honesty, hair has some really neat lines and colors that you don't notice unless you have taken a macro shot or otherwise close-up shot of it.  What we are going for tonight is the lines mixed with the backgrounds.  Take several shots.  You can always delete them later if you don't like the results.  

Here are the photos I am going to use tonight.

I warned you that the photos I would be using tonight were really bad.  My 12-year-old granddaughter was sitting on the arm of my chair watching TV when I just pulled out the camera and tried to get a good macro shot.  The only thing is, she kept fidgeting so the photos were blurred.  So, let's get started.

Okay, before we move on, let's talk software.  I am using Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X5.  So I may have different filters and effects than you have if you are using some other program.  There are lots of free programs out there as well.  I love this one because it is not so expensive, but does a lot of things.  But use whatever you have handy.  If you don't have any program as yet, just bookmark this page and come back to it once you have a program downloaded.  

I LOVE kaleidoscopes.  I loved them as a child and never really outgrew the appeal.  So I almost always start out creating a kaleidoscope design first.  I have found that often, if the photo will not do well with a kaleidoscope, it probably won't do well with other filters or effects either.  Unless there is a lot of color.  Then all kinds of things can happen with your software.

So, I set the effect for a kaleidoscope.  All of the settings were set to zero except for the number of petals, and the setting for "reflect" was checked.  This was the first result.

 
 Check it out on full screen by clicking on the picture.  See all those tiny lines?  Those are the hairs!!  Now you could stop here, but I didn't.  I just had a feeling I could come up with something more.  

For this next result, I kept the kaleidoscope and went to my effects filters and chose one from the group called "Fun House."  The one I chose is called "Sierpenski's Mirror."  Now within this filter there are various setting possibilities.  No two photos will ever turn out exactly the same unless you write down the settings you chose and keep very detailed notes.  I don't do that, so each of my designs remain totally unique.  It's up to you whether or not you want to do that for yourself.  I didn't like the result so much but I knew I could do something with it, so I added another filter on top.  This filter came from the "Simple" group and I chose the "Diamonds" filter.  But you can use whatever you like, and stop or continue on as long as you like.  You will eventually find that going on further does not make the design much better so you end up learning that there is a time to stop.

Here is the result.

 Now this almost looks like a piece of paper that has been folded many times.  Again, click the picture for a full screen look.  I chose this place to stop, for now.  I might end up going back at another place in time to change it more, but I doubt it.  You will understand more when I show you what happened with the second bad photo.

Now if you go back up and take a look at the two bad photos, you will see that the bulk of the hair is to the left on the top photo and to the right on the bottom photo.  The loose hairs spread out over the rest of the photo.  Also the stripe in the shirt has switched sides somewhat.  Will this make much of a difference?  Let's find out.

Once again I started out with the kaleidoscope effect using the same exact settings that I used the first time.  An interesting thing you will learn as you use your software often enough, is what kinds of quirks it has.  For instance, I've learned that this kaleidoscope setting pretty much takes the color that is toward the lower right/bottom of the photo and makes that the outside color of the photo.  I learned this when I found that I could create kaleidoscopes from scratch using the paint part of the program and use all kinds of colors, yet only a couple colors would show up in the results.  So learning where to place the colors you want to show in your results can be important.  Again, it's the strands of hair that form the lines of the design.

This time I decided to try a different effect, so while keeping the kaleidoscope, I went to the effect called "Artistic Effects" and chose one called "Glowing Edges."  While doing this tonight I think I learned something else about my software.  Normally this selection makes one of those black glowing pictures that you will see on red velvet type things.  But this time it turned blue!!  The only reason I can tell is that I had blue up in the paint color palette.  I do know that whatever color I have up as last used in the color palette can effect the colors of the filter chosen.  I had not seen this happen before, though.  It's always fun to find out new little tricks to play around with.  Having this come up in my favorite shades of blue wasn't bad either.  

This was one of those "ooooh!" moments I sometimes have when I am in the zone creating these abstracts.

After this I chose an effect from the group called "Distortion Effects" and chose the distortion called "Polar Coordinates."  Within that are two options plus other settings.  I almost always use the "Polar to Rectangular" rather than the "Rectangular to Polar."  Again, it is up to you what you choose.  The best way is to play around with the program to see what you like.  The more you like a setting, the more you will use it.  Something I like about this PaintShop Photo Pro program is that they have a setting where you can choose random settings with which you will never know what you are going to get until it happens.  That can be fun if you are looking for something different.  I suggest that if you do this, you keep notes of those settings you really like so you can find them again.

Okay, here is the polar coordinates result.

For awhile I was doing these with almost every design I played around with.  You can see more of these on my Flickr photostream.
But I did not want to stop with this one.  So I continued on thinking that maybe I might even be creating a wall grouping with these beautiful blues.   Next I again chose the "Simple" filter and this time I chose one called "Zoom Out and Flip."  (By the way, you can search the net for free downloadable filters for many of the programs available today.  That is how I got most of mine, although some come with the program.)

Here's the result of Zoom Out and Flip...

Once again I was pleasantly surprised.  Normally, this setting does some crazy flip-flopping of the photo.  This time it didn't and I think this was actually better than what I was expecting.

Finally, I went back to my favorite Kaleidoscope effect.  I guess I was thinking of bookends???  Who knows?  When I get into this, sometimes I get ideas that may or may not make sense.  But here is the final abstract I came up with.  

 There you go.  This is how I make most of my graphics.  There really are times when I don't use the kaleidoscope effect photo even though I almost always start out with them.  There are times when I use all sorts of other effects and end with the kaleidoscope.  Sometimes I never use the kaleidoscope.  But if you followed along here, and actually created your own abstract of your hair or someone else's hair, I am sure you came up with something spectacular.  If you enjoyed this tutorial, keep playing around with your software program and see what kinds of things you end up with.  

If you enjoyed this tutorial, please let me know.  Also, please share it with your social media groups.  I may add more tutorials if this one is popular enough.  Thanks for spending your time with me.