Closing Time

So i thought of a new genre of imagery called 'desolation porn'. If you are familiar with 'ruins porn', then you know where i am coming from with this. What got me on this track is todays Slog AM in the Seattle Stranger. One of their reporters went around town photographing all of the closed Seattle bars. So i screen grabbed all of the images and started a new image collection called 'empty town photos'. I then used that as input to Gallery Show auto-mutation of temporal image operation effects.

So i've been babbling recently about how you can pull dimensionality out of an image in Studio Artist by build a multi-resolution gradient lighting effect with a series of individual ip op effects. Studio Artist does have a specific Gradient Multi-res Lighting ip op effect, so i've been mucking with that this afternoon to see how it compares to the manual approaches i've been working with over the last day. I used that approach for this image.

One thing i've been noticing is that the order of the various enhancement operations you are working with to build this kind of effect can have a huge impact on the final outcome. Things like smart blur, sharpening, unsharp mask, image compressor, multi-res lighting. How you order them seems to really depend on the nature of the image you are working with. Try experimenting with this.