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Going Abstract

Abstract image of lilies

Got this idea by following a YouTube video by Stephen Nowotarski called Create Your Own Abstract Art using Adobe Photoshop. Used one of my Queen Emma Images and selected the plant – then used Liquify Twirl to create some interesting floral effects. Selected one of the spirals and took it into an “oldie-but-goodie” Topaz Lens Effects. Yep – it still works! The Split Prism Filter that used the Five Way Split was added and then the Dual Tone Filter. Used different adjustments layers including the new Light Adjustment Layer which is really great (but be sure to use as either a first step or last, or it messes up your editing). Also made a couple grunge brushes following an article by Dave Clayton in Scott Kelby’s last PS magazine called Gonzo Holiday Gear Guide 18th Annual 2023 (pg. 118 – Creating Custom Grunge Brushes) – if you are a KelbyOne member, you can still download it. I hope to blog on this soon. Any brush might work. That is mostly what was done. Really fun! Have a good one…..Digital Lady Syd

09/06/2026 | Categories: Just Being Creative, Photoshop Filters | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Enjoying the Day

Image of a fisherman on a jetty

This guy is standing on a jetty fishing while I was zinging by on a boat trying to get his picture. Decided to try out a lot of new things on this one – some worked and some did not. It was not the greatest image since the boat was moving when it was taken and it is a jpg. Problems to start with, but I love the image so had to deal with it. Now that Photoshop and Lightroom/ACR have added so many good options, it really helped with this image. Tried out the New Color and Vibrance Adjustment Layer and the Clarity and Dehaze Adjustment Layer. Beta just came out with an new Light Adjustment Layer which contains the sliders from Lightroom’s Basic section – worked really well. Biggest issue was getting the fishing lines to show up. Had to use a Levels Adjustment on a copy of the original darkened way down to see them, then reproduce them as best I could on a New Layer using a hard Brush at 1 px, then click, and then ALT click at the end – to create with black color. These had to be reproduced several times. Overall I think it has the feel I wanted……Digital Lady Syd

06/26/2026 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Blue Jay

AI created image of a Blue Jay using Chat GPT

Just playing around with this beautiful image that Chat GPT AI created when I was working on my Trying Out Different AI Programs Fun Photoshop Blog. (Check out the blog to do this.) I put in a wrong prompt and this is the image I got so it was downloaded since it looked kind of nice. I have a Blue Jay family living in my backyard right now, so it seemed very appropriate. A glitter look was created on the leaves using a blue glitter texture clipped to a New Layer and painting on it with a regular old Photoshop spatter brush set to 45 pixels. Can actually use any glitter color and add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer clipped on top of texture and the blank layer for painting – just move the sliders to get the color you want. For some nice free gold glitter textures, check out Gold Sparkle Texture Images like the one used on this image. The difference on how it looks is from the brushes you apply. The gold glitter texture was clipped to a new layer for the gold effect this time. A small 15-pixel heavily textured brush was selected to paint in the tiny leaf veins, berries, and bird feathers. Used a Daily Texture called Tranquil Start 5 on top set to Darker Color blend mode at 69% opacity. On a layer mask, the bird was lightly painted back in his face and breast. A highlight layer was created by setting top layer to Overlay at 15% opacity – just painted using soft round brush with white on just the breast, a few feathers, and face to drive the focus. That was it. It was so much fun to do!…..Digital Lady Syd

05/18/2026 | Categories: AI, Just Being Creative, Photoshop Painting, Textures | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

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 | 1 Comment »

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