Two things. Yesterday morning early I went out in the woods. It was foggy so I didn’t take the Canon 40D with the 70-200mm but instead screwed the 45-200 on my GF2 — because that rig was lighter.

I’m still getting to know that camera. And later in the day I was playing around with some Corel Painter tutorials. This was linked to from a post at RetouchPRO.

The five images show the transformation from a throw-away picture (I chose iso800 bcs I wanted things to be in focus but they were waaay grainy — I liberally applied Noiseware in Photoshop to reduce the noise) to being fixed somewhat in the LAB color space in Photoshop to being simplified with the Pixelbender plug-in…then I played around with lightening and darkening bits according to the previously posted link. Finally I opened the finished Photoshop image with Painter and played around with the auto-painting function.

Fun stuff. I wish my camera had a ‘vivid color’ settings like my smaller P&S Lumix. I wish Painter let you paint in a blending mode…