Creating a Digital "Slide" Montage

Trees at Circle B Bar

This past weekend I spent two mornings at the Circle B Bar Reserve.  As I was returning to my car from a morning a bird photography, I found myself walking through many Live Oaks.  These are absolutely beautiful trees.  I don't often photograph them because I frequently only take with me my 400mm lens.  But more and more I've been bringing a long my 10mm-22mm lens and 17mm-85mm lenses just so that I can be ready for more wide angle photographic moments.  These trees captured my attention so much that I decided it was worth changing lenses to spend time photographing the trees.

Trees at Circle B Bar

For these photos, I simulated a "slide montage" in my image editing software.  I duplicated the image as a separate layer, applied a Gaussian blur to the bottom layer (set to 45) and then set the layering mode to "multiply."  This gives you one "color" layer and one "detail" layer.  When these two layers are combined, the effect blurs the colors while still maintaining detail, and it creates a sort of dreamy effect with lots of saturation.  This effect also tends to increase your contrast, so it is most easily applied to low contrast images.  For higher contrast images, applying this effect may blow out your highlights or cause you to lose all detail in your shadows.  You can apply local lightening and darkening to the blurred "color layer" to compensate for this.

Trees at Circle B Bar

Trees at Circle B Bar

For comparison purposes, the image above and the image below are similar compositions, but the image below is presented without the "montage" effect.  I think it makes a pretty big difference.

Trees at Circle B Bar