Share Six: August 2023: Adamski Effect

How did we get to August. Seriously this year suddenly seems to be flying. Share Six is up again and this month I chose to challenge myself with something I skipped in another project. The theme for this month is the {Adamski Effect}. Its a very neat technique, but I was challenged with new tutorials and working with my old CS6. Sometimes I did not have the tools they were talking about or I had to get to them via a different format. That said I did what I could to try and get the effect I was looking for.

I used my Australia photo’s again to play around with this technique. It is painstaking selecting process to get the main object, and I think on a couple my selection was a little off. I also found that they talked about modifying and expanding the selection but that did not seem to work for me. Then I found on some images it would fill with content aware and on others it would not. The effects typically used a motion blur but I did do one with gaussian blur to see what kind of effect I would get.

All that said, it was fun to see how creative I could get. So some of these pics you may have already seen in their normal format and now you will see them in the Adamski Effect.

I choose this image because it was the easiest of images to start with. That said I was not crazy about the black streaks to the right of the man. It was a person and I should either have selected them as well or cloned them out. This was taken on our walk from the hotel to Darling Harbor. Australia has what I think they would call green walkways. No cars and it is the best.

This image had the tall buildings and I kind of visualized the rainbow effects being a little different. We started walking up towards Bangaroo Reserve and then kind of did a detour and I am not sure where we resurfaced but we did eventually find our way back to our hotel.

So this is the effect I was looking for, however, I was not too crazy about the giant white pole in the way but I had spent too much time on the selection and was not starting over again. I loved the movement in the tall buildings. This was on one of the main streets in Sydney, George Street, on our walkabout back to our hotel.

This is probably my favorite of the images I played with. Instead of blurring vertical, I blurred horizontal. This was taken the morning we went to watch the sunrise over the Opera House. This guy was randomly sitting on the steps listening and looking at his phone.

I honestly love the background effect to this building. The boat was on it’s way in but it feels a little awkward given the height of the buildings. This was taken from the Sydney Harbor Bridge looking back towards Luna Park – the amusement park near the Kirribilli markets.

You met this guy in my last blog of the walk from Bondi Beach to Bronte. For the most part I think I did a reasonably good selection of the surfer and I do love the effect of the slightly off horizontal blur. And who doesn’t like a surfer.

For this image I used a Guassian blur instead of a motion blur. This is such a common picture of Richard – he always has his toes in the water. That comes from growing up within walking distance to the beach and spending time out on the water either fishing, surfing, paddle boarding, you name it and he’s probably done it.

For this image I was back to the motion blur. However, I did not want to do too much so this has more of a painterly look to it. This is the 12 Apostles on The Great Ocean Road. What I will say is I think that they are down to about 6 or 7 apostles these days. This image was taken on an overcast day with lots of wind and water spray. The scenery is stunning and this will be back on my bucket list when we go back. The cliffs here are incredible and so high.

For this image I used a horizontal motion blur. I loved the colors in this image. We had visited Australia in the fall and so we got to see a lot of reds and yellows. I am not sure where this was. It could have been after we came out of the Great Otway National Park. We had taken a detour through the Park to the light house.

I did this image twice. The first time I just isolated the leaves, but then it looked like floating leaves so I redid this to get the vine in to ground the leaves. Again I opted for a slightly off horizontal effect. This was taken during our time in Melbourne where we decided one afternoon to take a drive to a wine farm. What I loved about it was that it was about 15 minutes from where our family live. I could do that easily on a weekend for sure.

This is my last image. By now I was tired of tirelessly selecting the image. My version does not have “select subject”. So it was a painstakingly back and forth to get the selection as accurate as I could. I loved the way the colors in the back ground blurred. This was taken in Sydney 2 days before we left. There was a local market that we thought we would walk through and see what we could see. I had visions of bringing things home but that did not work out. So we ended on one of those Richard walks through the Rocks and up to the Lord Nelson Hotel and then made our way back to the hotel. This was a great day, as my childhood friend, who was now living in Brisbane came through with a friend to Sydney, and after a few beers back at the market area we headed by ferry out to Watson’s Bay to meet my cousin and his wife for the first time.

So those were my attempts at the Adamski Effect. Not perfect but I enjoyed trying to get the effect. I really hope that you will be challenged to try it as well.

Here are a few links that you can check out when trying:

https://photographychef.com/how-to-get-the-adamski-effect-in-photoshop-step-by-step/

I used this one a fair bit.

and this one as well.

This is a circle blog and as I mentioned, we have some very talented artists in the group. I hope that they are all challenged to do my (Adamski Effect) challenge. Take some time to follow the links and see what they have for you this month. My incredibly talented friend Janet of @wiredtothemoon_ is up next. I can’t wait to see what she has to share. You can see more of her work by clicking on her IG page. Definitely check out her incredible art.

Look out for more blogs.

Stay well

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