Artistic Liberties

Lately I've spent time taking perfectly good images and digitally altering them to achieve a special look or effect that I like. If you are a photographic purest, you'll frown at what I do. But, for me, I've found the process quite liberating. Now only that, but it also creates a whole new slew of artistic possibilities.

One technique that I've tried is "out of bounds" which is the effect that results from framing a part of your image so the rest of the image appears to be outside of the frame. It creates a very interesting almost 3-D effect. The best part is that it's really quite easy to do with Photoshop.

Here's a Tri-colored Heron seemingly about to walk right out of the image. Pretty cool, don't you think?

You could do this with almost any image. But it's best to pick an image that has some part of it specifically that you think would look good if it were "outside" a frame that you create around the rest of the image. It only takes about 10 minutes to do, a little longer if you're a stickler for detail. Here's a great tutorial on YouTube so you can give it a try.