The Painterly Photograph - Inspiration Revived

Perhaps you know the feelings: the initial excitement as you take what you believe will be an “award winning” photograph, followed by the sense of deflation when it doesn’t turn out as you imagined. My introductory blog post contained one such image. However, sometimes it is possible to resurrect the dead. In this post, I will discuss how a bit of experimentation with Photoshop techniques to create a painterly look transformed one of my “failures” into a fine art photograph.

Image 1. Original infrared image: Two trees grow in the rolling wheat fields of South Australia. The wheat, which reflects siginficant infrared appears nearly white in this monochrome infrared capture.

The Scene That Sang to Me

I was approaching camp towards the end of a long day on the bicycle. My pace had slowed as I watched the scenery slowly pass by. This is the stage when my whole body consumes the environment surrounding me, and I noticed two trees in the distance growing in a field of wheat. The minimalist composition of the trees, rolling hills and scattered clouds in a clear blue sky stirred my photographic desire. This was an Australian wheat farm in its raw, simple beauty.

It’s not easy to carry a lot of photographic gear on a bicycle, but I did have my infrared camera and small telephoto zoom lens. This was a golden opportunity to get some reward for the effort.

When All Doesn’t Go Well

I’d like to think that fatigue played a part, but in truth, it was probably carelessness. I focussed on the wheat without paying attention to the trees, which are a little soft in the photograph, as shown in Image 1. The photo is also low in contrast, lacking the punch I was after. I was disappointed.

I came back to the image several times over the subsequent couple of years. There was something emotionally magnetic about it. Yet despite trying many of the standard (and some not so standard) photo processing techniques, I could not produce artwork that recreated the excitement I felt when approaching the scene on my bike. It was time for a bit of experimentation.

Photoshop includes a tool called “Generative Fill” which uses artificial intelligence techniques to modify an image. It draws upon learning from large numbers of existing photographs, what already exists within the image being processed, and what you ask it to do. For example, using my original photograph as inspiration, I asked Generative Fill to create for me on a blank canvas “Golden wheat growing in a field on two rolling hills with two trees between the first and second hill. Scattered white clouds in a blue sky”. Multiple alternatives were created, and I have included the image that most closely matched my original as Image 2. Reasonably close, no? I was hooked!

Image 2. Photoshop Generative Fill Alone: Using only a basic text description to create a facsimile of the initial infrared photograph, this image was one of many created using Photoshop’s Generative Fill.

Image 3. Photoshop Generative Fill with image guidance. The original infrared image has been used as guidance for Photoshop’s Generative Fill to recreate a painterly-styled version of the scene.

There are several very good tutorials on the Internet describing the following process, so I won’t go into detail here. What follows is an overview of my thoughts and workflow in creating the final result.

Maintaining the minimalist composition was a key goal. In order to get closer to the original redition than Image 2, Generative Fill was provided with the initial infrared photo for guidance on composition. The artist’s vision comes into play through deciding how much of the original image Generative Fill is allowed to work with and how the desired end result is specified. The structure of the underlying composition was maintained by heavily constraining how much liberty Generative Fill was given to do its own thing. It was asked to transform the original to look like a Japanese Sumi-e painting, a style of art I have long admired.

At this stage, the image was still monochrome like the original, and I was finished with using Generative Fill. There was little structure in the scene to truly show the style I was after, which was not helped by the significant areas of near equal tonality. Therefore, selective colouring was applied to create blue skies and golden fields, providing some differentiation to engage the eye. The result is shown in Image 3. Better than the original, I felt, but it still was rather bland.

While still experimenting, the trees were given a reddish tint to create a low-saturation image using a simple, pleasing colour palette. Finally, the texture of white art paper was blended with the image to give it a more painterly look. Image 4 below is the outcome of this process.

It’s hard to assess how the final print compares in terms of artistic merit against other images in my portfolio, or elsewhere. However, the re-emergent emotional bond I originally felt when seeing the fields, combined with the satisfaction of experimenting beyond my normal comfort zone, has given me a fine art photograph I am very satisfied with.

Image 4. Fields of wheat -the final art piece. The completed fine art image processed from a basic monochromatic infrared photograph and processed within Photoshop to create a scene with overtones of a Japaneses sumi art painting.

Cheers, IJM