If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try Try Again!
Love how this image turned out with a beautiful texture added to it. This is a very sentimental favorite plant for me since it came from my parents home in Indiana many years ago – it loves Florida. It is a Dieffenbachia, which is a poisonous plant around animals and kids so not the plant for everybody, but is very pretty in your home.
This image was processed using my basic Lightroom workflow. (See my How to Use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Lightroom 4 Quickly blog.) Once in Photoshop, Karen Burn’s Day’s End texture was added on top (check out her Flickr account – great textures and images here), flipped (CTRL+T), and set to Normal blend mode at 58% layer opacity. A white layer mask was added and using the Photoshop Charcoal brush set to 250 pixels and a low opacity 12% brush, the leaves were lightly painted back in the mask – this brush gives a bit of a gray rough edge result that blends with the background nicely. I use it a lot for this effect. Just keep painting over the area you want the focus of the image to be. I was not really happy with the overall pastel feel of the image, so a Curves Adjustment Layer was added and the Blue channel and Red channel curves were adjusted to get a better colors. I still was not happy with the color so a Selective Color Adjustment Layer was added on top and in the Reds selected – Cyan was set to -48 and Yellows +46, in the Cyans – Cyan was set to +60, in the Blues – Yellow was set to -46, and in the Neutrals – Black was set to +19. That really made the color sing – sometimes it takes several different methods to get the look you are after. Overall, with just a little effort, this rather average image was turned into something quite stunning!…..Digital Lady Syd
