Photo to Art

by Joseph T. Sinclair

First, you get a good pho­to­graph with an inter­est­ing image. If you have a lot of good pho­tographs with inter­est­ing view­points, you have an inven­to­ry (gallery) from which to draw for your first project. Of course, you have to decide what your pur­pose is. Your pur­pose may be one of the following:

• To make a poster for an orga­ni­za­tion, church, or school activity
• To make a print to hang on the wall in a frame
• To make a met­al print to hang on the wall
• To make a dig­i­tal birth­day or Christ­mas card.
• To just have some fun

The way you trans­form pho­tographs into a work of art is through the use of fil­ters (or what­ev­er they might be called in your par­tic­u­lar image edi­tor). You can also use the slid­er con­trols in an image edi­tor. So let’s take a phone cam­era image and see what we can do with it.

If you want to make a poster, it might be enough just to add text.

How­ev­er, trans­form­ing the pho­to­graph into an artis­tic image might add some piz­zazz to your poster.

Let’s say you want to cre­ate a print to be hung on the wall as a work of art. Try a vari­ety of fil­ters to deter­mine what strikes your fan­cy. Each pho­to­graph has its own fea­tures leached out by a par­tic­u­lar fil­ter. You have to exper­i­ment. Here are sev­er­al choic­es for this photograph:

I like the sec­ond one for the pur­pos­es of mak­ing a paper print to frame and hang on the wall. Met­al prints, how­ev­er, real­ly make the col­ors pop, so if I were doing a met­al print, I think I would choose the third one. A met­al print cost more than a paper print, but it comes ready to hang on the wall and does not require a frame.

You real­ly don’t need fil­ters, because you can use the slid­er con­trols in an image edi­tor to cre­ate cer­tain effects in a pho­to­graph. Below is an effect cre­at­ed by using the sat­u­ra­tion slid­er and the hue slid­er. This is just one exam­ple of the hun­dreds of effects you might cre­ate by exper­i­ment­ing with the sliders.

A dig­i­tal image card is the same as a poster. For the poster, how­ev­er, you want to keep the image res­o­lu­tion as high as pos­si­ble. For a dig­i­tal image card, which you will send via email or post on a web­site or social media site, you want to keep the image res­o­lu­tion low­er so that the file size is not large. 800 x 600 is a good size. It does­n’t take high res­o­lu­tion to fill up a good por­tion of a com­put­er mon­i­tor so that view­ers can see things clearly.

Play­ing around with fil­ters and image edi­tor con­trols in post pro­cess­ing your pho­tographs can be great fun just by itself. I find to be a pleas­ant source of amuse­ment, and chances are you will even­tu­al­ly cre­ate some­thing that you want to show oth­ers. Today, it’s quite easy to show oth­ers your good work by send­ing an image via email, putting an image on your web­site, or post­ing an image on social media such as Facebook.

So give fil­ters and image edi­tor con­trols a try to see what you can do.