The last month has been a whirlwind with lots happening in all directions. It made me think about how we get stretched in lots of different directions and that naturally led me to thinking about pixel stretching again. If you aren’t familiar with the process, you can check out my previous post for some tips and instructions.

This time, I took a new twist on the idea and added in some masking to stretch some parts of the photos while leaving other parts untouched. The object selection tool in photoshop makes this process a lot more user friendly, but it doesn’t do all the selections perfect every time. You have to clean up the layer mask by hand to get the cleanest result. It’s a little bit time-consuming, but definitely worth the time invested.

I tried lots of different subjects and several different techniques as I was playing around. One thing that I noticed as I photographed with my phone camera was that I shouldn’t use portrait mode for capturing my images. I needed the sharp edges without anything going fuzzy in my scene as I was masking out my subjects. If you look closer at this shot of the lily, you’ll see the pollen sections blurring out which made it harder to get that nice sharp edge.

In my multiple attempts, I found that I liked the way the single object looked against a stretched background.

Remembering back to the last time I played with pixel stretching, I wanted to also see what it might look like to bend and warp the layer with the stripes. My first attempt was not my favorite, but it’s still fun to experiment.

I think I’m much more partial to my last creation where I duplicated the stretched layer and also kept the subject as the main point of focus. Maybe I’ll play around some more with this technique as the summer progresses?

Still stretching – Angie