Red Flowers in the Snow
Once again here is an image I never thought I would process, but thanks to all the beautiful textures out there, the flowers end up looking like I remember them – well sort of – minus the snow. These Celosia flowers were taken in the courtyard at Flagler College (the old Ponce de Leon Hotel) in St. Augustine, Florida. This image was first processed in Lightroom where cropping and Basic Panel sliders were adjusted. An Adjustment Brush was applied to sharpen some of the foreground flower tips. In Photoshop Melissa Gallo of Painted Textures in her tutorial video Turn Your Photo into a Pastel Painting, Pencil Drawing or Pen and Ink, the second example, was followed. First the background was duplicated and the top row was set to Screen Blend Mode. A black layer mask was applied and with a white brush, the dark areas of the flower was painted in white to lighten the color on the mask. A Levels Adjustment Layer was applied the Midtones set to .78 to increase contrast just a little. A composite was created on top (CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E). Next 2 Lil’ Owls Mosaic Set’s Claude texture (see sidebar for website link) was added and a layer mask added where the flower was painted back into the image using a soft 30% opacity black brush. A text layer was added showing the name of the flower using Flakes font at 131 pt size and a brown color. Another line of text was created using a quotation from Emily Dickinson using Chopin Script font and set to a grayish brown color. My free SJ Snow Overlay-slight blur was duplicated several times, merged, and set to 75% opacity. A Curves Adjustment Layer was the last step to add a little contrast. I loved the final result, and for some reason the snow just added a special effect to a red flower look…..Digital Lady Syd
Beautiful Christmas Flowers
These flowers were once again taken at the local grocery store with my little Kodak Point-and-Shoot camera. I bought four textures from Melissa Gallo’s Painted Textures website on Black Friday and love them. These are very painterly textures and create a different look! She also has some very interesting tutorial videos on how to apply a texture – keeping the texture on an image and painting in color to remove texture from parts of the image, which is what was done here. Check out her website if you enjoy textures as much as I do.
The biggest change I did on this image was in Lightroom where the White Balance eyedropper was sampled throughout the image until I found something different that I liked – it turned a rather dark fall colored image into a bright red and pink image. Totally awesome! I also used a Lightroom Adjustment Brush to sharpen the yellow centers of the flowers and some of the rose petal edges. Now following Melissa’s tutorial, Shadowhouse Creations Vintage Soft Grunge texture V32b texture in Set 3 was applied using the Multiply blend mode at 84% opacity, along with Painted Textures Taupe Canva using Hard Light blend mode at 35% and Pink Impasto using Hard Light blend mode at 67%. A Color Balance Adjustment Layer was added to increase the red color a little in the Highlights and greens in the Shadows. A Curves Adjustment Layer was added to lighten the overall contrast of the image.
Totally loved the result!…..Digital Lady Syd
Digital Lady Syd Related Blogs:
For Tidbit Blogs, click on the Texture Category to get several more.
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