Painterly Images (Digital)

There is this idea in photography that gets a lot of discussion at times depending it seems on if it is trending in some social media channel like YouTube. It is also a descriptive term some photographers use for images that might be taken in 'soft' light, perhaps with some light fog or mist or with a lens that is not stopped down very hard. The term that often comes up is 'painterly' which usually means 'like a painting'. I won't get into the obvious ironies here only recognize this is an idea or an objective in some people's photography. 

I mention this because I have run across this before and have even made a few images I described this way. More recently I watched a YouTube video of a Venezuelan photographer Samantha Cavet who has made this part of her style. The video is here...  

My examples are here... No doubt debatable but the idea is there. These were not intended but the light and the film colluded for a unique look. 

This first one has a small palette of colors and also exhibited blue cast I attribute to the Ektachrome film that has some reciprocity problems around 1 second where it gets bluish and needs a correction filter. I didn't know this at the time, and I want to exploit this more in the future. 

Here the fog imparts that dream like quality and lack of precise edges that is a hallmark of some paintings. 

In the darkroom I think I have approached this look as well though with a small color palette. 

Silver gelatin print with toning

Aspects of the Painterly Image->Pictorialism

The maker of the video, Teo Crawford, uses terms such as dream-like, soothing, comforting, romanticism. He also talks about creating an image focused on the world in this moment. I think this last idea is perhaps the most difficult, as I think it relates mostly to composition. A painter has an enormous advantage compared to a photographer, that is to make any composition they desire. Change perspective, add or remove or move objects. 

This is perhaps the greatest challenge I anticipate in making these kinds of images. How to find and capture that entire world focused on a moment. 

There is a related area of photography, at least to my mind and that is pictorialism. Patrick Daum is quoted as defining it this way in Wikipedia...

Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of "creating" an image rather than simply recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus (some more so than others), is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white (ranging from warm brown to deep blue) and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.

 I think this covers what we are talking about here. British photographer and master printer Andrew Sanderson discusses pictorialism in an OnLandscape article here... Below is an example of his work reproduced here without permission...

Andrews Sanderson-Buttercups Keld

Imitation of the Form

I attempted to recreate this style using digital techniques. I started with an image I took yesterday up on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk UK. This was taken on my Fuji GFX 50s ii camera on a 35-70mm f4.5/5.6 lens. I am using Photoshop Elements 10 so there are limitations in terms of manipulations. It is limited to a few operations for adjustment layers, Level, Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Photo Filters.  Still, I was up for the challenge. 

I started with this JPEG from the camera. 

Base Image

I then applied some conventional adjustments to the image. The first being a warming filter (85) 

Apply Warming Filter

Next, I did some brightness and contrast adjustments. I wanted a darker image to give more of the mood I was looking for.

Brightness and Contrast Adjust

This is only a start and so doesn't look great. I want to add contrast for the central subject, the ferns. I created a mask brightness/contrast layer and selected just the ferns. I used replace color to change selected green tones to white on the mask then desaturated and increased the contrast of the mask through a level adjustment and finally I used a brush tool to blot out everything around the ferns. 

Brightness mask for the ferns

This mask then allows me to adjust the brightness and contrast of the ferns independently of the rest of the image. Now the ferns stand out more...

Now this is arguably a decent version in itself. It has a different feel from the original image, and this is owed to darkened areas. This is something I learned in the darkroom could significantly affect the look of an image. 

I next thought that I would add some autumn color. Some of Samantha Cavet's images had what looked like autumn colors and I do not know if they were manipulated or not, but I assume they were placed there. 

I made another mask again using the replace color options to create white areas where the green leaves in the canopy are. I then desaturate and exaggerate the contrast. Finally, I paint out the lower fern area as I want it to stay green as I have seen in some fall images I have made in Holme Fen. 

Autumn colors mask

This mask I applied to a levels adjustment and then took the middle red slider to the left so it increases the red channel while moving the middle blue slider to the right removing all the blue. The green is left untouched. This gave some nice autumnal colors. 

Autumn colors

These are not very bright so I need to saturate these colors but not the ferns. The ferns are fine. I take the original highlight mask for the ferns and invert it and apply it to a saturation adjustment layer. 

Saturation mask

Saturation results

Wow this is vastly different from where I started. It is missing the dream-like element which I think can be replicated with blur. The trouble is I struggled to figure out how to add blur with this limited version of Photoshop. 

Finally, after some experimentation I remembered about layer opacity. I duplicated the base image, then added gaussian blur and made the layer about 40% opaque. This gives just the right gauzy look. 

Blur layer

Final Image

The inevitable side-by-side comparison.

I am not sure how I feel about this. It lacks the integrity of most of my work where I don't perform so much manipulation, but I am experimenting here so shouldn't be too hard on myself.