Tarawera Times

By Megl

More playing with Pep Ventosa

Just like a number of other Blippers, I have a real sense of excitement as I hunt for new subject matter to play with this technique.

I was in town this morning and popped into Kuirau Park to see what I could find. I think for trees, those with a more "airy" look, seem to work better. I spotted this cabbage tree but the surrounding lawns, and odd scattered trees didn't look that inspiring, but had a go. Could only take 12 images as I would have ended up in the bubbling mud pool if I had tried to go around it!
And couldn't believe the end result, it looks like a scene from the middle of a native bush, and this method brings so much more depth into an image.

A bit of technical info on what I did.
From Lightroom I used the Open as layers in Photoshop. I chose what I thought was the cleanest image and moved it to the bottom of the layer pile. Set that to 50% Opacity.
The next layer up I set the opacity to 40%, then the next 30%, then 20% and then dropped them roughly by 2% until the top layer was at 5%.
For all the layers I set the blend mode to soft light.
Then I flattened the layers and used NIK filters with Pro Contrast and some Detail Extractor, especially on the Cabbage Tree leaves and the sky area to bring out some of the trees.

But I couldn't resist the last of the wisteria at the park as it was falling all over the path...my extra.

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