A little help please. I'm doing a photographic study of the historic churches of our county in north central Arkansas. We have many restored and well maintained old country churches that date from just after the Civil War. This is to be a fund raising opportunity for us as photographers/custom framers along with our local county historical society and cemetery association.
I've been trying out the Orton Effect on color images and like what I see. The church images will be printed and sold as B&Ws. I know I can do the PP myself and learn quite a lot but I'd like a bit of help and the question is: Should I convert to B&W then apply Orton or apply Orton to the color image then convert to B&W? What would be the differences if you know? I can experiment all I want and eventually I will figure it out but if any of you have already been there, done that, your experiences would be most helpful and greatly appreciated.
Not sure if it makes any difference, but my practice is to Ortonize at the end of the process, just before resizing and sharpening to final print size.
Image->Duplicate.
In the dialogue box set blending mode to screen and opacity to 100%
Control J to duplicate
Apply Gaussian blur to taste (say 5-25 pixels)
Change blend mode in the layers palette to "multiply"
Hope this helps.
I have written a quick Photoshop action to automate most of it - you need to set the level of blur to suit your image/taste
It seems to work nicely for me in color. My question still remains if I want the final output to be B&W should I convert before or after Orton? Hopefully tomorrow I'll have some time to play around and determine for myself; just though some of you out there might have some hints if you had gone through this before.
Yes I would just try it out myself, convert to BW and see how it looks. Should only take a few minutes.
Not meaning to hijack the thread, but I can not find the PS actions folder on the mac.
Can anybody point to it please?
Don't use a Mac - but if you search for .atn files you should be able to locate it. However, you can store actions anywhere - once they have been loaded into Photoshop they can even be deleted (although you would have to be pretty daft to do so as if you lose the Photoshop file they are recorded in you would be up a creek without a paddle )
The concept I think has been around longer than PS--it was originally used for slide film. I do agree that it's a technique to use sparingly; with the right image or use it can be really cool. Overused & it becomes cliche quickly.
Just played around with that a bit -- I've used that effect for some years, got it from some book, and never new before it was called the "Orton effect."
Surely whatever you do first is what you feel gives the best results, but at least when using the Calculations approach to convert to B&W, it's clearly better in the test cases I ran to add the layer and blur after performing the B&W conversion. So, I guess it depends on which method you are using for the B&W conversion.
I've never seen any difference in doing before or after B&W conversion. I normally make the decision to go B&W with an image early in the workflow so by the time I'm ready to do an ortonizing it's already in it's final form.
I also find "multiply' isn't always the appropriate layer mode. I often use soft light, overlay, or screen. But then again I don't like the heavy handed look, I prefer it more subtle.
I actually use effect a lot in very subtle ways to increase saturation and local contrast while giving the images subtle glow. I shall call it "Jammy-ness"
Jammy, no offense intended, but those images are all blown-to-light like hell, and try again, dude. I readily admit I never heard of "Orton", just learned someone did the same, but you're trailin' dude, the original topic is churches, and these images simply don't apply. Try cranking up your whitepoint BTW.
christo™ wrote:
Jammy, no offense intended, but those images are all blown-to-light like hell, and try again, dude. I readily admit I never heard of "Orton", just learned someone did the same, but you're trailin' dude, the original topic is churches, and these images simply don't apply. Try cranking up your whitepoint BTW.
I intended for the images to be "hot". There's nothing blown that I didn't mean to blow. They print well and appear to my taste on my calibrated display. Ortonizing a photo does strange things to their highlights.
I'm not a fan of how most web browsers render the father and daughter dancing photo, it's not really that warm.
I unfortunately don't have any photos of ortonized churches to share and thought I'd give a different perspective on the technique.
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