Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly
Just had to display this beautiful butterfly that appeared on my Bottle Brush bush recently. This is a female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and had at least a 4-inch wide wing span. I did basic processing in Lightroom and then opened it in Photoshop. Just did a clean up layer and a Topaz (see website link in sidebar) Detail filter using the Overall Medium Detail II preset. I tried several different textures and nothing seemed to look right. So the layer was duplicated and the image was opened in Nik Color Efex Pro 4. These filters were stacked: Detail Extractor, Monday Morning using the Neutral color set and an opacity of 58%, Film Efex Vintage set to Film Type 13, and Vignette using a white color. These are all favorite filters of mine in this plug-in. Next OnOne’s (see website link in sidebar) old PhotoFrame 4.6 filter was applied using Kevin Kubota’s preset Kinky set to 63% opacity and a size increase of 7% and using a creamy color sampled from the image. Back in Photoshop a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer was added and the Reds Saturation was set to -58 to tone down the bottle brush color. I love the vintage feel of this image. I am sorry that OnOne is not longer releasing PhotoFrames – I am having trouble duplicating these effects in their new suite……Digital Lady Syd
A Little Hollywood for My Butterfly Model
If you have ever tried Kelby Training, then you know how good it is. I just finished a short video class on Quick Composite From Photo to Finish by Calvin Hollywood, a wonderful Photoshop guru from Germany. He was shooting a lovely model but I like my lovely model above more. She spent quite a long time flitting around me and my bright pink penta flowers posing along the way. (She is using her proboscis to feed by sucking out the fluid of the flower, not unlike the trunk of an elephant.) I did a previous blog called Butterfly Beauty! a while back, where several different textures were applied. Also Mike Hardisty Photography recently posted a pretty white butterfly in his blog.
Calvin’s sharpening technique was used to sharpen the butterfly and it did do an amazing job! See Scott Kelby’s Guest Blog featuring Calvin with a short video on creating Freaky Amazing Details. An action for this can be downloaded here. His vignette technique was also used to spotlight my model and a couple of his color manipulation tricks were used to add some artistic flair. Overall, Calvin had a very good tutorial. The textures used in this image were ShadowHouse Creations Mixed Bag 2 set to Darker Color blend mode and Scratch Box 4 set to Overlay blend mode. The beautiful French writing in the background is French Kiss’s Script brushes that are for sale very inexpensively. ….Digital Lady Syd
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Spotlight Effect With the New Subtract Blend Mode
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
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Digital Lady Syd’s Rule No. 5: Just Step Outside and Look Around!
