I've been feeling rather magical lately - don't know why, but no - I didn't sell out to an AI photo manipulation software suite.
A few days ago I was walking around in a park, feeding some squirrels and taking pictures. There were so many little groves, nooks and crannies everywhere and it seemed a fitting place for fairies to live if they so deemed. My originals aren't particularly pretty or anything interesting to look at even, it was midday : probably the worst time of day to take photos due to the heavy shadows and overly intense contrast. Instead of being a party pooper I took the photos anyway thinking that perhaps I could shjooze them up (yes, it's a word dammit) and the following night when I was dealing with a rather severe episode of insomnia (which by the way, is totally different to insomniomnomnomnom as that's just a case of the midnight munchies) I started messing around on my phone. This is the original below that I started with.
Well first I fucked around with the filters in Fotor and added about 6 of them, changed the contrast, then chucked the image into Snapseed. I added glamour glow and a retrolux layer, played with the levels and curves, highlights and so on. Then chucked it into Canva to add little gold sparkles - which by the way there are not many free versions of. This frustrated me because I could have just added these using brushes in Photoshop, but I was too lazy to get out of bed so I struggled on with this for a while. Added some lens flare elements too and even a bit of smoke, stary sky dots as fireflies. Before I knew it, I had transported myself into a fucking fantasy book cover hahaha. By this time it was way past 2am and I had spent the better part of 3 hours toying with this image. Sure, it's not as fast as AI, but I enjoyed the process of transformation this way. Can you spot the fairies?
This was quite cool so I decided to do another one as well.
The weirdest things happen when you start playing with filters. They can completely change the impression of the image. I added so many filters on this one and adjusted so many levels of colour, that I lost count. I wanted to keep the well in the image but unfortunately that just didn't happen and like any art, sometimes you just have to trust the process.
Have a look at how the image changed and the rocks started to take on an almost ethereal look like the kind of reflections you see in water. I really love how this came through.
While I really love the eerie green glow in the distance which in itself is rather ominous, I wanted to make a slightly more kid-friendly, fairy version. This one didn't quite come out as intended, but after adding little touches like fireflies, light sparkles and lens flares, I added my fairies and the one I chose had a little ring of roots in it which encircled the bluest part of the image, making it look even more like a little pond.
Unfortunately this little fairy looks a bit sad and contemplative, do you think she lost something in the pond?
I added a little fairy grandmother to help her find it.
This was an impromptu session of photo shjoozing and was really fun seeing where the photos took me. It's not often I get to mess around like this and often it doesn't really work out. Let me know which one you like better in the comments and if you've got any ideas or suggestions on this kind of thing.
