Challenge - Pictorialism

[dryadsdad]

Pictorialism is a school of photography which states that photography should resemble painting or other fine art schools. It flourished for many years around the turn of the last century. Here's an article on it:

Pictorialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This school was crushed by the modernists whose major name is Ansel Adams. The modernists believed that photographs are art in and of themselves and no imitation is needed. However the romance of Pictorialism is today an art form of itself. While hardly dominant today, it does form a somewhat popular style. A very few images from this style then were tinted, but most were b&w due to the times.

Here is a an image I did of our pond in the style:



Your assignment is to take an image of a suitable subject and work it in PP into a B&W image showing the style of Pictorialism. If you hit upon a good method to do the conversion, please post your steps, but process explanations aren't necessary.

This Challenge will run for several weeks.

Edit:

Here are some hints as to how one can create a Pictorial Image.

1. Use the Channel Mixer to do the B&W conversion. Feel free to use several layers of Channel Mixer emphasizing different areas of the image based on the underlying color masking layers to affect only that area of the image you wish to affect. Frex, if you have water and wish to make the water very dark, apply the CM and add blue. Similarly, you can play with Red and Green for changes to foliage.

2. Another way to get that Pictorial look is to due a quick Orton Effect. Duplicate your base layer, change the blend to Screen. ^E to flatten. Duplicate the resulting base layer. Apply a Gaussian Blur. Reduce the opacity of the blurred layer. To do a better overall job, also mask the blurred layer and using a very soft brush, allow only part of the blur to affect the underlying image.

3. These guys were using ortho films which tended to overly brighten the skies. So think bright skies rather than Ansel Adams when doing a conversion with a lot of sky.

[JDArt]

Interesting. I had never heard of this before. Would this qualify as pictorialism?

[Athena]

How about this?

[Waleed]

Oldies, and probably posted before.. I should be more active than this

[dryadsdad]

Originally Posted by JDArt

Interesting. I had never heard of this before. Would this qualify as pictorialism?

Very much so. Think of it as the impressionistic branch of photography.

[dryadsdad]

Originally Posted by Athena

How about this?

Too good technically as a modern image in the face / hat / tonality. Please see the article. The concept is of softer images similar to what an impressionistic painting would look like. Here the face is rendered too sharply where the b/g especially works in the genre.

[dryadsdad]

Originally Posted by Waleed

Oldies, and probably posted before.. I should be more active than this

#2 not quite there, but #1 is a perfect hit. Great execution of the concept (and yeah, we've seen them before but they're hardly worn out).

[Waleed]

Thanks..
I have the next few days off, I'll try to make something then.

[CanadianRocky]

First Effort

As it would appear on rough paper for effect.

[KatMitchell]

Here is my try at it... I hope this is what your looking for...