10e20 Blog

Sometimes you may want to really express the feeling of a picture by emphasizing certain areas or saturating colors and exaggerating outlines.

Sumi-e is a style of ink and wash painting developed in China during the Tang Dynasty.

Literally ink painting, it is an art form that strives to distill the essence of an object or scene in the fewest possible strokes.

When you are looking for that artistic approach to enhance your photos try these steps to push the color and texture by using some basic filters and search for the essence in your latest photographs.

You may not get the photo looking like a Chinese Ink Wash, but some of the treatments will look pretty cool and when used in a combination with other processes can be very useful.

I used a Polaroid photo I took recently. The photo is pretty strong on its own without any manipulation, but the Sumi-e filter process makes the image much more painterly and artistic without looking overly photoshopped.

Step 1. Prepare the photo and Dodge some areas. I usually make a duplicate layer of any photo before I start any process, in case I want to refer back to the original quickly. Using the Dodge tool at an Exposure of 15% or less, Range of Mid-tones with a small diameter brush, make several passes and blend some areas that may show up as to dark. The filter steps that follow may over emphasize these and cause them to look rough and weird. Use the brush quickly and play with the size- you want to leave the detail in the picture but generalize some areas, leave detail!

Step 2. Duplicate the layer and apply the Sumi-e filter by going to Filter/Brush Strokes/Sumi-e. Using the default settings or experiment with the variables like stroke width, pressure and contrast. If you did not do the prep work in step 1 your image may make the darker parts sharp and out of place. Fade the Filter by going to Image/Fade Filter and lower the opacity to about %60-75 and change the mode to Overlay. At this stage the image looks a bit Photoshop filter-esque. This is what we are trying to avoid.

Step 3. Create a new layer of solid white. Reduce the opacity of this layer to about %45 or less. This will give your image a pastel looking feel that is soft. Merge these 2 layers.

Step 4. Add some contrast. Adjust the Curves by going to Image/Adjustment/Curves and selecting the darks and whites and rebuilding the tonal range. Hue and Saturation adjustment would be beneficial as well as some Selective coloring to bring out the overall color and tone of the final image.

Step 5. Final Dodge and Burning. Duplicate the final flattened image from the steps above. Set the layer mode to Overlay and select Dodge/Burn and using a low exposure work in the shadows (Burning) and the highlights (Dodging). The trick is to examine your image, identify the lighter and darker part of your image and where they meet, then dodge and burn intelligently to bring these differences out. Play with the layers opacity and try a slight Gaussian Blur to that layer.

Flatten the image and make one final adjustments to the Curves and Selective coloring. If you like you can then repeat this process on the final image to push it even further. That’s it! I have found this technique to be very useful and ultimately pretty simple to do.