Damn! That's pretty impressive! What a great shortcut for rich, atmospheric backdrops.

What exactly were the settings? Now I wanna try it! You should try to figure out a way to tease out a bit more clarity for bits and pieces of the foreground elements. For example, if the big gray rock and some of the tree trunks in front of the temple were less fuzzy you'd get a more powerful sense of depth.

But like you said, impressive results for such a short investment of time. I look forward to seeing future refinements to this technique.

Yup. Clarity and depth are the first two casualties of this process, and I'll eventually have to experiment with ways to bring them back. Working with higher-res images might restore some of the clarity and detail, but possibly at the expense of the painterly look I'm trying to cultivate.

Ultimately, the real work takes place when I snap the photo. I'll need to frame each shot with a strong enough composition that it would still be readable on a postage stamp. And even then I'll probably have to do some brightness/contrast prep-work to each image before I run the filters.

Then there's the manual tweaking each image'll need after all the filtering is done—a shadow here, a highlight there. For example, I think I'd probably add some glowing white dots (representing miscellaneous points of light) to the harbor image, to make it look more like dusk. Well, that and bringing back the landmass on the far side of the harbor, not to mention the water itself... (A great no-work solution for this is to rifle through the RGB color channels of the original image. One of them usually puts the contrast right where you want it.)

By the way, did I mention one of my favorite things about this technique? I should be able to dump CG elements into any photo before I process it. After filtering, they'll look like they belong there. I think.

Meh. It's still easier than painting.

you have a bad sense of humour to mention mushroom clouds you putts... I would love to create one with a kick to your dumb ass head... I have family from this country .. where do you live so I can show you a lesso ???

First of all, my address is in the FAQ section. By all means, show me a lesso.

Second, I apologize for offending you, but you misunderstood the caption. The point I was making was that, by the time I was finished graphically reworking the harbor photo, it was so orange it looked like a scene from some apocalyptic science-fiction movie. I wasn't making a joke about Japan or anything else, for that matter. It was not a humorous caption.

Third, "putz," a Yiddish slang word for the male genital, has one "t" and a "z."

Hi Mike - really neat images! Have been following some of your adventures since I found out about the site. Thanks for the informative and entertaining tales.

kp (of kp & shane "fame")

p.s. don't let the barely literate cyber-bozos get you down...

Very nice photoshop work! I'm looking forward to seeing the animated project once it's done...

jp (of' brother of kp' fame)

Thanks, man. Hopefully you'll be seeing more of this stuff once I get the screenplay revisions out of the way...