› › COLUMN> PHOTOSHOP USER>^ MARCH 2020[ 90 ]
REDUCE AN IMAGE
TO ITS BASIC PARTS
George Morland’s The Bell Inn
is a very different piece. While
A Storm has distinct graphic
elements, Morland’s painting
appears to be just a basic scene
in a rustic setting. How does
Morland use balance, weight,
and contrast?
Let’s reduce this painting to
gray blocks and consider the
graphic pieces.
The large, dark-gray region
has a small area of lighter gray
that offsets the bright sky. Note
that it doesn’t have to be as
bright as the sky in order to
have enough weight for bal-
ance. Even more interesting
in this piece is how the larger
weighted regions frame the
people. Lowering the Opacity of
the gray layer a bit shows this.
If you want to practice reduc-
ing images yourself, there are a
number of approaches. For The
Bell Inn, I simply desaturated a
copy of the background image,
then applied the Median fil-
ter (Filter>Noise>Median) at a
low value several times. For small
images typically found online, a
setting of 5–10 pixels is sufficient.
Repeating the Median filter 3–5
times helps reduce details while
preserving larger boundaries.
To get the solid fields, use
the Polygon Lasso tool (nested
under the Lasso tool [L] in the
Toolbar) and block out a region
that you feel has a similar tonal
range. Press Command-J (PC:
Ctrl-J) to copy the selection to
a new layer, Command-click
(PC: Ctrl-click) the thumbnail
of the new layer to reload
the selection, and use Filter>
Blur>Average to fill the selectionThe Bell Inn by George Morland, 1787Graphic blocks of
The Bell InnLower opacity to show the scene