Playing With Calculations

[Bill C]

Some interesting results possible with Calculations command in PhotoShop....(Interesting .... not necessarily great)...
Bill C

[Andre]

Great shot Bill - I love it!

[Swampy]

Where is "Calculations" in PS and what did you do? Looks like a, well, I know it's not a Infrared shot, but it has a similar effect...

Really cool though!

[Bill C]

Thanks ....... Calculations is found on the menu bar ... Image/Calculations (with the set of Duplicate, Apply Image, Calculations) .... It has two SOURCEs (single channel from each source) and a mask source is possible. The source can be layers from the same image....or even from another open image of the same physical dimensions (usually the same source image with some filter/action applied).... you can then select various channels and possibly invert the channel ..... you can have different blend modes and optionally a mask ...fun to experiment with ... output can be a new alpha channel within the same document or a new document. (if a new document you will probably have to convert it to grayscale and then to RGB)....
Bill

[Scubagrapher]

Yes Bill I like what you did with this one. I'm not sure why, but it reminds me of the shot in those videos that show the effect of the blast of a nuclear explosion. I keep expecting the building to be obliterated any second.

[Bill C]

Scubagrapher and Carlo - Thanks for the comments.
Carlo - here's what I used on this one. Calculations has two SOURCE images (actually, two source layers - layers from the same document, or layers from different documents that must be the same physical dimensions....typically it is the same image). For this example, assume that I call my open image ORG.JPG

With ORG.JPG open, you access calculations from the menu bar:

Image/Calculations You will then see a box divided into a couple of different areas... For his one I used:

Source 1: ORG.JPG
Layer: Background
Channel: Red (experiment with this)

Source 2: ORG.JPG
Layer: Background
Channel: Green

Blending: Exclusion (I may have used Difference on the one I posted)

Mask: CHECK THIS BOX (you may want to check this first thing so you can see some of the changes as you enter the other info)

Result: New Document

******* You can get some very 'interesting' (awful) results - but it is fun to experiment ... do some inverts....change blend modes..etc....you can have different versions of the same picture open and used as different sources ... etc.... just try it...(or different layers from the same image..etc)

Oh yeah ..... after you click OK, you probably want to convert it back to RGB in order to save it as JPG or TIFF....

Image/Mode/Grayscale
Image/Mode/RGB

Regards,
Bill

[deMille]

Starting to look like solarizations I've done in the darkroom. Been looking for the technique to apply to digital.


Thanks for the info.