âDo you still consider it an Impressionistic masterpiece?â
IMO, no.
âOr call it an overly cropped hot mess of noisy pixelated blagh?â
No, again. But why does it need to go to such extreme opposites?
âWas it worth the effort?â
Since the effort was yours, only you can answer that, IMO.
To paraphrase from on old Monty Python skit, âI may not know a lot about art, but I know what I like!â
The colour and atmosphere is exceptional, unfortunately let down by the âhot mess of noisy pixelated blagh.â If you could smooth that out, or add some grain or digital brush strokes (gmic style transfer?) to disguise it, you would have something very nice indeed. It looks great at thumbnail size on my phone, where you canât see the pixelation.
Itâs noisy and pixelated, but somehow quite appealing, especially if you can ignore for a moment the fact that itâs a photo. The original photo you pulled it from appears to be quite underexposed; you would have had less noise to fight if you had exposed more.
Yep, all good points. As an exercise in what can be done it was pretty interesting and passed a few hours. Printed it out in a 6x4 inch with a big border and slapped it in a gaudy frame - doesnât look half bad (the other half, wellâŚ)
Any takers for a worst before and best after show and tell?
For the thread title alone, it was definitely worth it, on my end at least
To try and answer the question a bit more seriously: The result you reached probably isnât quite worth the effort you put in, even though itâs obviously great work considering this hot mess of a source image. Or at least it isnât worth it with direct regard to this particular image and/or result. But in the process, you certainly learned even more about your artistic judgment and how to execute it more proficiently. So yes, the effort was worth it because I trust youâll be applying daring treatments like this to better source images, and then the result could be a true Monet shot!
I assumed that the Critique category and the showcase tag are for serious posts, and I didnât read any sarcasm in your post or in any of the replies.