Orton and Me

I've always been a purist when it comes to photography, but in the switch to digital I've learned that post processing is almost a necessity. I still generally try to keep it to a minimum, but in my web searches for tips on post processing I came upon the Orton Effect. Originally this was done on film when the photographer took a two different exposures of the same subject with one out of focus and put them together into one image. It creates a quite interesting artistic, painterly effect. The original photo of the stilts above is in my Desert Ducks post from last month. I played around with quite a few images and found that it has the potential to make mediocre images fairly interesting, but only a select few pictures seem to benefit from it. The technique I used can be found here. It is quite easy to do in Photoshop.

The original photo of this Egret is on the left. I was not excited about it because it is flying away from me and the wings are a bit blurry. The "ortonized" version on the right looks a bit more interesting and the blur in the wings is not as important.

The purple flower on the left is a pretty good picture. When I used the Orton Effect on it, however, the colors in the photo got much richer and an interesting three dimensional effect was added.


The leaves of this Aspen were blurry because it was a slightly breezy day when I took the picture. Ortonizing the photo enhanced this blurriness and enriched the colors.