Raas Garba, Diwali 2018 – Austin, Texas

The Raas Garba is an Indian dance. I shot this during the 2018 Diwali festival in Austin. I previously posted a couple of photos from this dance, but today, I wanted to showcase more of what the Topaz Studio software can do. I wanted to transform fairly conventional photos into a festive art-ish scene.

There is almost an infinite variety of effects you can create in Topaz Studio. I applied the same pre-created watercolor effect to four of the five photos in this set. And, though I could have easily applied a pencil, paint or abstract look, I like how these watercolors look. It fits my impression of the scene. That’s part of the creativity you can express with the software.

You can combine the artistic effects with other adjustments such as A.I. Clear, which cleans up noisy images. Of course, in this case, the artistic effect will probably mask most of the noise, anyway. You can take a look at the original photo, in this post. ISO 12,800 photos from my Canon 6D works perfectly well.

Here are two different kinds of watercolor effects from the same base image. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Finally, photographs with motion blur can also work well. Here, I shot this with the Olympus PEN-F at a slow 1/20 of a second to purposely induce blur. I think it adds another layer of abstractness that can work is these art-ish images.