If you follow my photography blog, you probably saw my latest digital art work, that I call Road to the past. As promised here is the details of how I made it.

I recently saw the movie Speed Racer, and liked the smooth saturated Anime like feel. Not that it would work for every image, but it had a good feel. So I started to work an some actions. I frequently get visual ideas from movies, and movie posters, and though I’m sure this does not meet the official standard for Anime, it was inspired by that look.

I‘ve finally found a sweet spot with a few adjustable actions that give a saturated, Anime type look, without looking fake and foolish. Here’s a bit of what I did to get this image.

This is my original image. This was taken on a side road of HWY 12 in Washington. A cool shot, but not yet spectacular…

My first job in making this into digital art, was to clone out the things I didn’t want. The goal here was not to make an exact representation of this scene, but use it as the model for the piece I really wanted. I also added some clouds in place of the blank sky that was in the corner. Below is the cloned version.

So when all the cloning was done the rest was easy now that I had the action I needed. I ran the effect I’ve titled Anime II, and then spent some time doing final adjustments on the layers & masks. Lastly I added subtle beams of light (look far up the road) to add some dimension do the image. Basically this was dome by painting white lines on a new layer, blurring them, adding a little outer glow, and then setting that layer to overlay mode.

I‘m happy with the finished product, and it looks great in print. I feel the effect is not too over the top, and yet still has a good feel to it that offer something more than just a plain photo. It’s close to that line between painted, and photograph, yet without looking automated. I’m defiantly loving these actions

If you want to hurry me along making these actions available, or want to be added to the notification list just drop me a note… Gavin Seim