kayaks | Russel Ray Photos

As I was cataloging pictures this morning, I came across this one:

It’s a pretty lousy picture because it was taken through a windshield in the rain. Ooogy colors, ooogy sky, just ooogy all the way around. However, I thought it had potential so I put it in my “See-if-you-can-do-something-with-this” folder.

The kayak looks rather fast, but I don’t think it can go as fast as that van. Nonetheless, I wanted to see if I could do something that portrayed speed. Here’s what I came up with:

First I took the original file to Photoshop to see if I could do something with Photoshop’s filters. I didn’t find anything I liked so I went to my Topaz Labs plug-ins. After working my way through several of them, I found a setting in Topaz Glow that I liked, and that’s what you see.

Time required to find the right filter: About 4 hours.

Time required to create the picture after finding the right filter: About 4 seconds.