Lion Transformed

Over here there's photo-editing competition where we're supposed to use a black and white image of a lion as a starting place and then produce an output image.

I didn't really start out knowing what I wanted to produce at the end, but I knew I'd want color in the image. That seemed like a reliable place to start, so I used the Deep Dream generator page that the contest linked to, in order to redraw the lion using the "style" from some images that I thought might be beneficial. I wanted yellows and red and hair or grass. I wasn't sure if the lion's background would be important to the final composition, but I knew that these sorts of things would be safe creatively and fair use.

Once I had that, I loaded the dream image and the original into Nodewerk and started mostly just splitting and blending with different alpha-effects, along with some resizing and repositioning. Along the way there was a lot of "doodling" with various filters and effects, but in the ends, keeping it simple tended to produce things I liked best.

There are two vectors that I'm concerned with regarding my output -- the final image where the gif rests, and the transitional movement that leads to it. I like the b+w to reasonable color to the wild red and black transition in the animated GIF, and I'm happy with the end point. But the simulated motion is a little glitchy the way I did it. I don't know a tool that's dedicated to that kind of work (but I bet there's good stuff out there) -- I was just capturing frames as I tuned the nodes in Nodewerk and then dropped them into gimp as layers and had it export the .gif file with nearly the default settings.

Anyway, it was fun. Thanks to @creativesoul for hosting this and to you for reading! :-)