Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Multiple Exposures and Topaz Restyle in Corel Paintshop ProX5

In the long interim since my last post I have been busy creating multiple exposure images and exploring a new plugin called Topaz Restyle.  Here I combined both and then took things a step further with Paintshop's glowing edges effect.

The multiple exposure image is created digitally by combining several or many individual shots.  I took 21 pics of this set up.  I liked the light shining through the beer bottles but it didn't translate well to what I had imagined.  The background is too busy and this might work better with one or two bottles instead of three.  At any rate I decided to see what I could get from the photos I made.  The camera was hand held and I intentionally moved so that no two shots were exactly the same.


Using Corel's Paintshop Pro X5 I opened all the images and copied them as individual layers into one image.  I made the base image larger by increasing the canvas size.  This allows me to get an edge effect after I re-position each layer.  That doesn't show up very well here but you'll see it in subsequent posts of trees where I have used the same technique.

To blend the layers in this image I simply adjusted the opacity of each.  The top layer is at 5% and the bottom layer at 100%, with about a 5% step for each layer in-between.  Each layer was also re-positioned and had a levels adjustment applied to it.  This next image also had the Topaz plug-in "Restyle" applied to it.  I wanted to shift the colors and by masking the bottles separated them from the bench and windows in the background.

Again, this really wasn't what I had envisioned so I  played with it some more.  Trying several effects I chose glowing edges and cropped in and darkened or painted out some of the distracting bits.