Cell Phone Meets Photoshop Elements

I enjoy taking pictures with my cell phone, sometimes in preference to my SLR and I think its in part that the limitation of the phone forces me to get more intimate with the shot and be a bit more spotaneous. The other thing is that since the resolution isn't so high-my little LG phone takes 640x480 pixel pictures-is that the photos come out sort of preprocessed. Of course our visual system involves several levels of processing anyway-so much for seeing the world as it is.

At any rate last week I took this shot with my cell phone while going to work. I don't know if one can find better sunrises then what we see along K-10 in Eastern Kansas.

One of my other secret pleasures is using the various filters in Photoshop Elements which include all sorts of painterly filters. Since I love painting I decided to have some fun putting this image through the filters. First I cropped out most of the image except for a relatively narrow part including the sun and the cars. I should have saved the original of that but I didn't and then decided to noodle around, first with the color and then with Photoshop Element's filters.

Here is what came out:

This image was made with the palette knife filter. I really like the red glow-almost misty look to the light.









Here is just a slightly different version of the same image with a courser setting-bigger knife strokes. More seems to be going on in the foreground. I like the more impressionistic look of this one.







Finally even though I am not a great fan of pastels except for Degas, I put my cropped image through Photoshop's rough pastel filter using canvas texture. Quite a different effect.








See also a related entry in my Science Blog, Dangerous Ideas.