We were in Point Reyes Station (map), a couple hours north of San Francisco.

As usual, I was dawdling with my camera as my wife was urging me to move along. I quickly clicked my pocket camera into macro mode and took a close-up of a flower before moving on. The flower in question was near the base of the orange banner is the photo above. (My next camera will capture its GPS coordinates.) Well, I pushed the macro button, but either I didn’t push it hard enough or I let it go too quickly. The resulting photo was out of focus:

A professional photographer would never have taken the photo in the first place, and any reasonable person would throw away the botched result. However, the Quick Shot Artist principle is to take photos quickly so you don’t keep people waiting, and then later spend time fixing them. As you also know, the whole purpose of principles is to short-circuit reason. So what can be done with a colorful but out-of-focus shot?

The answer is posterization, which is detailed in the Quick Shot Artist Posterize Tutorial. Posterizing converts the millions of colors of an image into something like 8, 16, or 32 colors. There are no fancy computations, it just throws away all the bits beyond the first few. The Photoshop Filter > Adjustments > Posterize dialog box lets you choose how many bits. Most often three or four works best, but in this case five seemed best.

Images needs many shades of gray to appear blurred. Posterization removes the shades of gray, leaving splotches of pure colors. Posterizing is not restoring lost detail that was in the image. The clear color boundaries in the image do not correspond to the real world. It is an example of artistic license. so now we are making art. Well, sort of.

I cropping the image and posterized it. After posterizing, I darkened the colors and lightened the flower a bit, producing this result:

Posterized images are well suited to reduction to small sizes for web icons. The bright colors compensate for the size to leave some punch in the image.

Technically, one could take a nice sharp photo, apply Gaussian blur, then posterize. This would remove the necessity of waiting for a screw up in order to make an pleasantly splotchy image. Fortunately, I screw up often enough so I don’t have to do that.