Benz World Blog » Glow

Fractal Owl

Jason Benz — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:39:25 +0000

This bird is a Tawny Frog Mouth Owl. The animal was in a nature park near Melbourne in Victoria, Australia.

To process the image I ran fractalius several times and built up the image with layers and masks.

New Year

Jason Benz — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 09:20:30 +0000

Happy New Year 2011. This was taken at the Ferry Meadows firework display in the UK. The glowing effect is made by first raterizing the text. This changes it from a vector to pixels. Once in pixels you can use bitmap effects in Photoshop. By using Gaussian blur on a copy of the text layer below you can create the glow.

Misty Meadows

Jason Benz — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 07:39:20 +0000

Last night we went to the Ferry Meadows Firework Display. This was taken at the end of the display. It was the second time I have photographed it with two cameras. I set up my prime lens to capture the reflection across the water on a fixed tripod. The second body had my wide angle on a tripod I could quickly point at any point of the sky. Both cameras fire almost continuously throughout the display. This is one of the rare times I do not shot in RAW. By recording jpegs only you stop the cameras slowing down as the backlog of large RAW files fill up the cameras buffer while they wait to write to the card. Firework displays are very much a batch exercise as its hard to predict what you will capture in a 4 second exposure. I took 217 images, I cut theses down to 45, Cropped a few and submitted them to Shutterstock. After a couple of days just these 2 firework shots were accepted.

Pyramid Panorama

Jason Benz — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:50:05 +0000

These are the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. This image began as five separate shots. Instead of developing each RAW I stitched them together as jpegs. Once stitched and cropped the resultant image had a low dynamic range. To fix this I used levels layers and in some cases individual channel levels to keep the sky blue. Finally I used a Fractalius layer to add some glow to the image.

Fractal Lizard

Jason Benz — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:59:02 +0000

This is an old cropped photo of a lizard in Jamaica. It was taken with my first digital camera, a Casio EX-Z3. I do not know if this type of lizard is a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. Please leave a comment if you know. The original image had a low resolution and was heavily compressed. Not much good for anything except it did have good outline of the lizard on a plain background. I started by doubling the resolution of the image. Normally this would not get you anywhere but then I used Fractalius which effectively redraws the image with new detail. I ran it several times to get the different parts of the lizard to look right. I then used masks on each layer to build up the final image.

Hathor Fractal

Jason Benz — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:58:21 +0000

This is a statue of Hathor in Egypt. To process this image I used a new technique I discovered last night. I saw it used with great effect on this image of an Amur Leopard taken by Thomas A. Statas. Like all photographers I have met online he was happy to share the technique. He used a Photoshop Plug-in called Fractalius. The effects are based on extraction of hidden fractal textures. For the artistic types it adds cool lights to your pictures.

Neon Glass

Jason Benz — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:11:16 +0000

This blue image image started life as a red firework. I chose this shot as it caught the very start of an explosion so none of the light trails has time to dip down from gravity. I used alternating effects of Stained Glass and Neon Glow until I got the final image.