Dirty waters by Ramlyn

Dirty waters by Ramlyn
http://www.filterforge.com/filters/12397.html

And here it is after preset #1.

As you know, there are two categories of filters, Textures and Effects.
The result of a Texture depends only on the filter itself, because no image is added.
But the result of an Effect depends also on the image type, quality, colors, size.
Some filters may work well only with images that have some characteristics.

Another thing to say is that the presets are made in generic way.
We can't always simply apply them. Many times we must use the controls to change the preset settings and adapt them to our photo.

"Dirty waters" uses the colors variations as a way to detect high and low areas in a picture. It then fills the darker areas with dirt/sand and dark water. It also adds some grunge to the whole picture.
This means that :
- The result will be darker than the original picture.
- Pictures with a smooth variation of colors will have a smooth effect. Pictures with a sharp color variation will have a sharp difference between the areas covered with dirt and the areas without dirt.
- Because the filter covers of dirt some areas of the original picture, if the original picture is not a clear and well defined object, the result may be not interesting.



Here is your picture with the main preset.
I used the basic controls to increase the Brightness a bit.
It looks someway better than your first example, but it is clearly nothing special.

The reasons are :

- This is only a small portion of the fire.
If we apply components, like Kaleidoscope or Smudge, that completely modify the original image, we may get good results.
But if we use filters that only retouch the image, the final result may be a bit confusing and not too exciting, especially if the size of the image is small.

- The original picture has a very sharp difference of colors and not much deepness. So the result repeat this contrast and flatness.

Sometimes we can get better results if we work on the original pictures a bit.
I show you an example.

Here you can see an image that you used previously in this forum.
Instead to use it with the white background, I quickly added some black color, without much care.



Then I simply applied "Dirty waters" ( preset 7 ) :



Even better if we can add a simple flare on an eye, like this :



Here is the result using the same preset :