by  Gus 

Last spring, I saw this lonely sailboat while walking around the port of Palma de Mallorca with my wife and daughter.  This beautiful sailboat seemed to drift away all on its own.  I could not resist photographing it.

“Alone ship”

My idea was to make a composite of several images, a multi-exposure, and blend them with layers in Photoshop.  For that purpose, I took several photos without using the function “multi-exposure” on my camara.  Those shots were taken with different focal lenghts and parameters to try them out while processing and hoping to reach the idea I had in mind.

From the 20 images I took, I selected these three to try it out.

First I applied the same settings to all three images in Camera Raw.
You can see here which settings were applied. 

Than I opened them in Photoshop, aligning the layers and applying different opacities to each of them. I also resized them to create the multi-exposure effect as you can see in the following screenshot.

But the result did not convince me completely.  I didn't want the hills in the background and was wondering how to eliminate them.

Most of the time, I use the Topaz Impresion suite.  It has some awesome creative filters.  I didn't want to use any filter with an “agressive” or “overdone” look not to change the appearance of the image.  So thinking about a “soft” filter called “pencil”. This filter gives the photo a slight pen sketch look.  Adjusting the values, the filter even made the background fading to really have the feeling of a ship drifting alone on the sea.

After applying the filter, I went back to Photoshop to adjust the values, brightness, contrast, and some saturation.  Nothing more had to be done to reach my goal.

As finishing touch, I applied a little vignetting to highlight the sailboat and the sea to center the attention of the viewer.

This final result satisfied me and resulted in a publication on 1x.

I truly hope you enjoyed this little tutorial.  Sometimes, an image can be processed in a relatively simple way to take the viewers with you to your “imaginary world” of that moment.  I'm pleased that I was able to polish this one with a bit of my creativity.

A good advice: always let your imagination flow to create a different image out of your own fantasy world and share it with others.

All the best,
Gus