More Butterflies Enjoying the World
Can’t get over how many wonderful butterfly shots I got this year. I think they really liked out yard since we had so many blooming plants. These mating monarchs were dancing around my plumbago bushes in the back yard. They were moving so fast it was hard to get a shot where they were both in focus, but this one was pretty good. I actually had my ISO set to 800 in full light to get a quick enough shutter speed! In Lightroom I did just basic sliders and sharpened the butterflies using an Adjustment Brush on just them. Then I applied the Retro Vintage preset I created from Allen Mowery’s free preset (for download link and my preset settings, check out my Fun Photoshop Blog How To Add a Little Retro To Your Shots). The Radial Filter was used to created to slightly darken and desaturate the edges. In Photoshop Alien Skin’s Snap Art 3 was opened and the Impasto Portrait (soft) preset was selected. Three layers were used – one to sharpen the butterflies a little, one for the white flower, and one for the leaves around the butterflies. Back in Photoshop a layer mask was added and a little more of the detail of the butterflies was painted back. The frame is my SJ Double Edge Frame layer style. The colors turned out so beautiful!…..Digital Lady Syd
Yellow Dogface Butterfly in her Glory!
This Southern Dogface Butterflies (named for their heads that look like French poodles) visited my purple pentas this fall. They are very skiddish butterflies and are hard to photograph. I used my 60 mm Nikon Macro Lens to catch the shot at F/3.2, 1/2000, and ISO 200. The image was processed first in Lightroom 4 using the workflow from my How to Use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Lightroom 4 Quickly blog. To create the soft effect, Nik Color Efex Pro 4 was applied with several filters stacked: Midnight using Neutral Color Set, Glamour Glow with Glow set to 90%, Vignette, and Film Efex Vintage set to Film Type 2 and an Overall Opacity of 40%. The Sharpen Tool was applied to the face. Nik Viveza 2 was applied to soften the bright tones in the background and to sharpen the head a little more. My Mid Size Double Edged Frame was added to the image to finish up. I really enjoyed working on this image – it has a different feel to what I normally do……Digital Lady Syd
Butterfly Beauty!
Today I had a chance to get some wonderful shots of one of the beautiful butterflies that are flying all around my neighborhood. This is a female Palamedes Swallowtail Butterfly and she is loving the pink pentas in my front yard (the males are smaller and more black in color). I was so surprised that she stayed around while I shot several pictures. The trick to getting the shot since her wings are flapping like crazy – set your ISO to 1600 and shot at F11 and higher. I was able to get many very clear shots. Three textures were applied using Russell Brown’s Paper Texture Panel: ShadowHouse Creations Scratched Overlay set to Hard Light blend mode at 100% layer opacity and Softly Blurred Edges set to Overlayat 100% opacity (see sidebar for website link), and Gavin Hoey’s Grunge Border set to Overlay at 100%. All had layer mask applied and the butterfly was painted out completely using a black brush in the mask. A Curves Adjustment Layer was created to adjust just the blue channel curve to bring out her blue spots, then the mask was filled with black (with white Foreground color, CTRL+BACKSPACE to fill with mask with black). Just painted back in the blue dots in the Curves Layer Mask with a white brush. That is all that was done to the image – what a showgirl!……Digital Lady Syd
Digital Lady Syd’s Related Blogs:
Digital Lady Syd’s Rule No. 5: Just Step Outside and Look Around!
