Punts On The River Cam At Cambridge

It may not be immediately obvious, but look at the water to see the difference between the final version and the Prisma version of these images.

This is how I made the final version

I took the photo with my iPhone and then put it through the Prisma app. There are lots of effects within Prisma and I don’t recall which one in particular I used for this. I made several different versions using different effects and then chose the one I liked best.

I imported the original photo and the Prisma version into Dropbox and transferred them to my computer and opened them in Photoshop.

I overlaid the Prisma version over the original and scaled up the Prisma version to fit (because Prisma makes a smaller version than the original photo).

Then I cut back the Prisma version layer in the areas of water to make the final version.

The reason I did all this at all was to make the punts stand out more against the background. Tamara noticed and pointed out that in the Prisma version, the punts were looking a bit lost in the blocks of colour throughout the image.

So the nice diagonal strip of the original river marked off the punts and separated them from the houseboats on the far bank.

I also made a greeting card with the final image, or rather with part of the final image because the card is in portrait format and only part of the image shows.

What I thought was going to be an easy job of positioning turned out to need a bit more thought – and this is what I ended up with.

The Prisma app is pretty popular – and there is a sense of it making things too easy – well, too easy if you actually like the effect!

Using it does make me think of the other way of working which would be to stand and sketch from scratch, and paint and colour the image.

Of course it takes practise to achieve the skill required and that takes time and dedication.

I can stand in front of a Rembrandt and almost be grateful that it takes so much skill to produce. It makes it impervious to the easy wins of technology.