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In the Still of the Night

Guitar Man playing in the night with an aurora and moon

This image was created using the AI Rotate command in Photoshop Beta on my favorite Guitar Man practice photo (can be downloaded from either Pixabay or ISO Republic). To get the full effect, need to take a peek at the linked original image. Totally not realistic, but lots of fun to create. The Rotate command is not working great yet so I was lucky it worked this time (it will require 20 credits to use once it is perfected). Lots of clean up with the Remove Tool, Spot Healing Brush, and the Stamp Brush was done, which is typical of a many of PS AI creations. The following used were all free. An On1 Night Sky Brushes 16 was applied. Used a Star Field set from Frostbo at Deviant Arts brushes 01 and 03 (can’t find on his site – also need to be a member to download) – a snow brush with a few brush setting adjustments would work just as well. The Aurora’s used Midnighttouch Brushes 1 and 5, and Devin Elle Kirkz’s Northern Lights Simple Base Northern Lights and Simple Northern Lights Size Dynamics. Then Color and Vibrance, Clarity and Dehaze, and Color Lookup preset Foggy Night adjustment layers were added. Lightened and darkened a few areas. Last step used Viveza – still the best PS plugin there is! Give it a try!

04/21/2026 | Categories: AI, Just Being Creative, Photoshop Filters | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Daytona Beach before Spring Break

This image of Daytona Beach was taken from the Daytona Beach Pier looking North in the early evening. Just after Bike Week and just before Spring Break hits the beach, and a storm starting to build. On this one tried a technique that Blake Rudis posted called Why Your Glows Look Fake (Fix It with Channels). Not sure this image was perfect for it, but Viveza was added on top to give it the final touch. Without any processing it was still a beautiful evening and beautiful sky. …..Digital Lady Syd

03/11/2026 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Spreading His Wings

Image of a Roseate Spoonbill at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm

Love this beautiful image of a Roseate Spoonbill at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Rookery. To create the soft light effect, the Bird and foreground was selected from the background. Then the background was blurred using the Gaussian Blur with a radius of 4.7. The bird was sharpened using Topaz Sharpen. The Camera Raw Filter used several masks to create the lighting in the image. Back in Photoshop the Color Lookup Foggy Night preset was set to 70% opacity. Last step was opening up my favorite filter, Viveza to even out the whole image’s color. Love this bird!…..Digital Lady Syd

03/09/2026 | Categories: Just Being Creative, Photoshop Filters | Tags: , , | Leave A Comment »

Palm Cockatoo Looking at You

Image of a Palm Cocatoo at the Jacksonville Zoo

This interesting Palm Cockatoo‘s image was taken at the St. Augustine Zoological Farm in Florida. (The difference between the Cockatoo and the Cockatiel is linked here.) In Lightroom, used the Background: Soften preset from Mark Dumbleton really nice set called MD Presets – Lightroom Tools V1.3 on the background. Downloaded (check out his Full Photo Edit Using My Free Lightroom Presets YouTube Video for link) them recently and I really like them. Then just followed a few of Matt Kloskowski’s instructions from his YouTube The Photoshop Technique You Didn’t Know Your Wanted. Enjoyed putting a texture behind this bird – used Soulful Sea Breeze from Jai Johnson (cannot find on her site) set to Linear blend mode. One little trick I have found useful is if there are just a few smallish areas that need to be sharpened or softened, just use the Sharpen Tool (and if it turns the area to an ugly color, set the layer to Luminosity blend mode to remove the color) and the Blur Tool – just adjust the Strength. Lots of fun!…..Digital Lady Syd

02/20/2026 | Categories: Textures | Leave A Comment »

Considering

Portrait drawing - no AI

This drawing was a lot of fun to do – it has been a while since I created one from scratch and no AI was used. I am trying to stay away from this as much as possible right now. All Photoshop brushes were used and many were adjusted to get the effect I wanted. As learned by doing my selfie series, one of my favorite brushes is a Chalk Brush with a heavy texture added in the texture settings. The original image used a Legacy Chalk brush with a texture taken from the legacy Crayon Brush (see my Just Drawing and Painting in Photoshop Fun Photoshop Blog – at bottom go to Adding Texture to Your Brush Information section on how to do this.) Used David Belliveau’s Paintable free brush download of Portrait Brushes (Textured brush 02). Created the collar and jewelry from Jessica Johnson‘s Chain Brushes set and her Luxe-Gold Leopard Exclusive brushes set to Mixer and sampling a gold texture. Need to sign up for her newsletter to learn this technique ,and she often sends out free brushes to try. These were Christmas give-aways from a couple years ago. Stacked a couple 2 Little Owls old textures from years ago. Hope you enjoy her thoughtful expression…..Digital Lady Syd

01/16/2026 | Categories: Drawings | Tags: , , | Leave A Comment »

Silver Star

B&W - or silver Christmas Star glitter ornament

This image of a silver Christmas Ornament was originally very out of focus (even after using Topaz Sharpen) with a lot of background distractions. I decided to give the image more of an outdoor night feel, but only after spending a lot of time trying to get it to look good in color. 14 different mainly snow type brushes were used. One of my tricks to keeping the brushes straight is to create a new group in the Brushes Panel and name it for the image, in this case Christmas Silver Star. Then the brushes being used are dragged into the new group (don’t save their original groups, just delete them and reload later if needed). If a brush’s settings are changed, need to create a New Brush and drag it into the Star group. This way you can get back to them very quickly. On a New Layer a Pattern Stamp Scatter Brush (with a turquoise glitter pattern) was used to get the foreground effect and on a separate layer, and with the same brush an evergreen pattern was painted where the tree color would be in the background. Good start but not near enough. (Here is a link for Free Glitter Patterns & Styles that should help you out here – once loaded into the Patterns Panel, they can be added to the Pattern Stamp brush by clicking on the drop-down Pattern Picker arrow in the Options Bar.) Selecting the Star, a silver glitter Pattern Stamp brush added more glitter to it. A regular fog brush was used to fill in the mid-area behind the star. A Smudge Tool set to 76% Strength was used to get rid of any distractions that were still apparent. A greenery regular brush was used to stamp down some edge branch effects. The bottom left was larger branches Set to Overlay blend more with bits of snow added to the tips of the branches. A Magic Dust brush by Pretty Actions added the snow effect. Last step involved converting to black and white with Silver Efex Pro – lots of tweaking to get it just right, but that was it. Took a pretty bad image and converted it into something rather fancy!…..Digital Lady Syd

01/10/2026 | Categories: Photoshop Painting, Photoshop Tips | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Big Bird

Image of a Yellow Billed Stork or Mycteria Ibis

Tried out a new tutorial on this fabulous Yellow Billed Stork image at the Jacksonville Zoo. He is hard to miss if you get into their bird section! Most of this image was post-processed using a very short YouTube tutorial called The Ultimate Masking Trick to Recreate Lighting Realistically in Camera Raw by Easy Photoshop. I did start in Lightroom to do some basic steps like selecting the Adaptive: Subject: Warm Pop preset, the Profile (using Camera Standard v4 for Nikon camera), setting Sharpening to 0, checking Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections, and lastly running Denoise and adjusting the slider amount. In Photoshop Topaz Sharpen AI was applied, then duplicated this layer and ran Gaussian Blur (Radius 2.5) on the whole layer. For layer selected what should not be blurred by using Object Selection and adding the foreground plants using the Selection tool for one big selection of bird and foreground areas. By adding a layer mask to the blurred image layer, the part not to be blurred was created. Next a stamped layer was created and turned into a Smart Object. Now the image was ready for the tutorial so the Camera Raw Filter was opened. This is where most of the lighting effect took place using the Masking section. It was actually pretty easy if you follow the tutorial steps. I really like the very nice soft warm effect on the bird neck and the background. Could not have done this before this year…… Digital Lady Syd

12/07/2025 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Lady at the beach

AI generated and digitally painted by me image of a young lady at the beach

Was not sure what to name the image – Lady at the beach or Feeling Breezy. Generated this image in PS using Adobe Firefly back in 2024. As you can see, it is pretty basic from what Firefly does a year later, but I still liked the overall feel of the generation. There was a lot of manipulation done to the image after it was created. Many layers of painted areas using different brushes. One thing that was selected was an old legacy filter from Topaz called Lens Effects – it created a rather soft lovely yellow vignette around the image. I just downloaded this nice font from Creative Market called Bellisa Script – it has many glyph choices which makes it fun. At least it feels like I put a bit of myself into the image…..Digital Lady Syd

12/05/2025 | Categories: AI, Generative AI, Just Being Creative, Photoshop Painting | Tags: , | Leave A Comment »

Checking his World

Image of a Rainbow Lorikeet bird

Had some fun doing creating this Rainbow Lorikeet parrot image. Once again, Matt Kloskowski has created a YouTube video called The Photoshop Technique You Didn’t Know Your Needed on blending textures with subjects. Love Matt’s tutorials as they are always very informative and not rushed at all. Already had a really nice bird image taken at the Jacksonville Zoo.

In Photoshop duplicated the background layer with the bird and then selected the bird. Added a layer mask – the bird appears in white in the mask. Replaced the bottom bird background layer with Jai Johnson Soulful Sea Breeze texture bought in 2015 (could not find it now) – her textures are great for wildlife photos. Then added on top her older freebie Wispy Clouds 2 set to Hard Light blend mode at 61% layer opacity – this brightened up the whole image. A layer mask was added and the corners were painted out slightly where it did not look right. On top of this texture another Soulful Sea Breeze texture was set to Soft Light to add strength to the colors – in a layer mask painted with black where it was too strong around the bird’s head. Selected the bird layer on top and blended the edges in using a very soft round brush set to a Flow of 10% very softly building up a nice effect. Last steps were: a stamped layer (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) for use with the Camera Raw filter where Texture and a new Profile were added; back in PS an Exposure Adjustment Layer was used to sharpen the eye a little bit; and a Vignette was created using a Curves Adjustment Layer set to Multiply – dragged down the top right side to 50 to make a darker image – just paint a large black circle in the layer mask with a very big soft round brush and set the layer opacity to 30%. The blending takes a little time but overall it was a lot fun…..Digital Lady Syd

10/10/2025 | Categories: Just Being Creative, Textures | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Gigantic Wave

AI generated and personally painted over image of a large surfing wave

I created this image while working on my Fun Photoshop Blog called Mixing It Up with Legacy Bristle Brushes in Photoshop-Mixer Refresher. The initial wave was created using the an AI prompt “Large wave for surfing” in Photoshop. Ended up flipping it, changing the color of it, and adding the Mixer bristle brush strokes on top of it. Most of the brushes used here were created by Fay Sirkis (brushes are no long available except on Kelby One). In the image above the beautiful blender strokes that were created for the wave are quite noticeable. And the foreground utilized some very small regular Mixer brushes that added color for the details. In other words, just by looking at many of the provided Photoshop bristle brushes, the paint strokes for the image could be figured out. Tips on how to work with these brushes are in the referenced blog. It was a lot of fun to see if I could get that frothy look into the top of the wave. ….. Digital Lady Syd

09/02/2025 | Categories: AI, Generative AI, Just Being Creative, Photoshop Painting | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

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