Painting from bad photos

I tend to work in different media to the saturation point. I have not be doing much else besides web design lately, and before that, I was doing nothing but photography. I am really getting an itch to paint in oils, so today, in order to prevent web design burnout, I took a little time out to look through my photo files to try to find something worth painting.

I have tons of images taken through windows on bus and cab rides. They are not great photos, but some of them might make reasonably good paintings.  This particular shot was taken during a taxi ride in Barcelona in 2005. The original image had poor contrast, weak saturation, annoying window reflections, crooked alignment and not-quite-right composition.

After fixing the problems in Photoshop, I still did not feel as if the image gave me the same pleasure as when I first photographed it. I decided to run a Photoshop filter on it and make it look a bit like a painting. It’s better, but I still don’t think it is worth printing as a 13 x 19 print. I think it would be  great on a 24 x 36 canvas with rich brilliant impasto oils so I am tagging this one as a potential future painting. The images below show the original digital shot and after all the Photoshop work.