My year in photos

I’m quite proud of this one – I’ve been wanting to replicate something similar to this for a while from a host of similar flickr images on other photostreams.

I used UFRaw and especially GIMP to get the effect.

In GIMP I did the usual auto-level mumbo-jumbo, then added a duplicate layer, on which I applied a unsharpen mask filter. It made the grains of sand stand out more. Duplicating this layer, I added a gradient, using one of the default full saturation gradients you can chose. I set this layer to Overlay so you could see the effect beneath on the sand. I added a full opacity layer mask onto this also and ‘drew’ out everything but the sand. On the unsharpened layer I used the clone tool to get rid of some dust effects. I also used the colour dropper tool and coloured in the top third of the image which had a grey reflection on it from the plastic black card I was using.

Now the set up for this was really quite simple. I used a black piece of plastic that I found in the bottom of a green bag and taped the front edge of it on a table and used a pot plant to hold the back up. On that I tipped sand and used a hammer to ‘move’ the sand. That part didn’t work that great – I had the card in the wrong spot. I didn’t get a chance to revisit it today, but will again in the future.