It’s so easy to be impressed with the brilliant flowers in Hawaii that the tropical foliage is overlooked. Flowers usually stand as individual subjects while foliage forms patterns. Foliage patterns call for close cropping to remove distracting surroundings. Usually there is no need for elaborate processing of the images, but sometimes posterization can be used to strengthen the patterns.

The color and composition have potential, but it is a bit blurred. Those fish refuse to hold still even if you asked them politely. It also lacks the dramatic impact that koi might impart. Posterization is a technique for further punching up photos. The methods reduces the number of colors in a scene by the number of bits in the color components. This produces larger areas of pure color, like a poster painted with a few solid colors.

Pomponio Beach is featured in a previous post about a gray-day panorama. Beaches are good places to find texture patterns. The margin between sand and conventional grasses is often home to an interesting assortment of plant life.

An image 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, they are examples of artistic license. So now we are making art. Well, sort of.