Hugh Milsom - how does he do it?

We all enjoyed Hugh Milsom's incredible pics in Feb 09 and there was a lot of discussion about how he achieves his distinctive look, so I thought I'd try some of the things I heard being bandied about at the end of his talk.

Let me make it clear that I'm not trying to put my pics even in the same league as his - just attempting to figure out what he does in the post-processing phase. As Hugh explained, he starts with a RAW and increases the exposure slider to move the histogram over to the right, whereas I started with a JPEG whose histogram was in the middle.

I raised the mid-tone brightness, saturated the poppy colour and slightly desaturated the greens (especially at the top), then applied the Water Paper and Gaussian Blur filters, on separate layers with different layer opacities, to different areas.

It's no oil-painting but I think I'm on the right track. Maybe.

Why don't you have a go? Click on the little "Add a picture" line on the left of the screen and you'll see the original file (Poppiesoriginal1.JPEG). Right click on it, then use "Save Target as" to copy it onto your hard disk. Then see how you get on. Don't forget to post your result on this page, with some information on how you did it.

-- RodBird - 25 Feb 2009

(George Blair) This was my attempt to try to copy the style HM. It's not worked but I thought I would post it up anyway. I desaturated the greens a bit, brought the level of the reds up, applied a mirror gradiant lens blur with a center focus point (vertical) and repeated this but horizontal with the focus near the bottom, then finished all the lot off with a slight G blur. Finally a crop across the top to try and focus the picture to the bottom.

I think I prefer the original file, really! - ja