mouse-over for before view.
After an unusually warm autumn up here in the French Jura, we were finally blessed with an overnight snow fall and so we drove up early into the
nearby ski resort and snapped away until lunch time, passing a bison farm en route and shooting them eating fresh hay, all the other cows having being taken indoors and finally buying a load of freshly churned mountain butter and their local Comte cheese to take home with us.
I’ll be taking home much more than dairy produce though, as I’m now well and truly hooked on Topaz plug-ins and stand alone Impression Topaz for Photoshop! I’ve been playing with their various plug-ins for 2 weeks now and I have to admit they’ve been nothing but fun and a pleasure to use with their general format being similar to Nik Color Pro, so its been easy to get used to, recently though, through Thomas Churchwell’s sublime portrait renderings posted on the Face Book Topaz Impression group, I also got to hear about the Topaz Impression painterly filters, there are so many to choose from, if you fancy, say, an Ed Hopper style paint effect, he’s there, along with Van Gogh and Monet et all. Amazingly you can download them all for a one months free trial period!
For me finally, these plug-ins are the perfect upgrade and antidote for filling the void left by Photoshop’s removal of their painterly filters from CC 2014.
For this image, as usual I ran it through Fly Nik color presets, I just slightly darkened the sky and added a soft cross processed LO5 color @ 25% but we’ll include this Bison preset in the next pack.This time I fancied something a little bit more illustrative than the artists presets, so I chose the Colored Pencils filter, it worked because of the bold graphical silhouette of the Bison on the snow background, it also cleared up the lumpy textured snow and rendered it into attractive snowy waves.
If you mouseover to look at my raw base shot, take note that I under exposed it as bright white snow is very hard to do moody imagery with. To finish and enhance the lonely mood I applied just one Flypaper Texture, the Classic Muscatel to warm and vignette. For more information and products please hit this hot link: Topaz
Bison Nik Fly Preset @ 100% (to be published soon)
Topaz Impression – coloured Crayons filter @ 100%
Flypaper Muscatel soft light @ 100%
Please visit our Pack page or Combo Pack page to buy Flypaper Textures. Or our Preset Page to buy Nik Presets.
For information and more plug-in products please hit this hot link: Topaz