Busy As a Bee!
This little bee and his buddies were very busy checking out this magnificent specimen of a purple succulent at the Harry P. Leu Gardens in Orlando, Florida. I am not sure what kind of plant this was, but it was a gorgeous color! No wonder the bees were attracted to it! The image was opened in Photoshop and the background duplicated. Next JixiPix Spectral Art’s Dark Lines preset was applied to the layer – see my How to Use the Free Spectrel Art Plug-in blog to download. A black layer mask was added and the effect was only applied to the bees to give a little more detail to the wings. A stamped layer was created on top (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) and Lucis Pro 6.0.9 (see my Digital Lady Syd Reviews Lucis Pro 6.0.9 (Now Affordible!) blog) was applied to further sharpen up the bees. Another black layer mask was added and the bees were painted out again and in the Properties bar, the Density was set to 80%. Some clean up was done on a layer. On another stamped layer the now free Nik Color Efex Pro 4 was applied using my favorite grouping of Film Efex: Vintage (set to Film Type 2), Darken/Lighten Center, and Monday Morning set to no Smear, Color Set Sepia, and overall Opacity 56%. On yet another stamped layer, Topaz (see sidebar for website link) ReStyle was opened up. The Sunflower Fields preset was applied and in the ReStyle Masks section, just the color was painted into the bees – this gives the really pretty golden color in the bees, and in the Basic section, the Detail Structure was set to -0.69 to soften everything but the bees. The last step was to create another stamped layer and apply the also free Nik Viveza 2 to the image to draw more focus to the bees. It always amazes me how these different plug-ins work together to get some great effects!…..Digital Lady Syd
Enjoying the Morning
This is one of my favorite images of a Siamang Ape at the West Palm Beach Zoo – he was one of my favorite subjects at the zoo. Here he has run up to the very top of a tree where he had a view of the whole zoo. I started with a Trey Radcliff preset called Venice Canalman in Lightroom before opening in Photoshop. JixiPix Spectrel Art using preset Dark Edges was applied – layer was set to Color Burn and a black layer mask was applied and just the ape was painted back. (See my How to Use the the Free Spectrel Art Plug-In blog.) That was it! Pretty simple and I love the contemplative expression of his body in this image…..Digital Lady Syd
Coming At You!
Below is an image of a Malayan Tiger taken at the Jacksonville Zoo earlier this year. JixiPix’s free Spectrel Art preset 10 was applied to the whole image. (See my How To Use the Free Spectrel Art Plug-in blog.) Next the tiger was selected using Topaz (see sidebar for website link) ReMask 5, then a white layer was placed underneath the tiger. One of my Corel Painter textures was added on top of the white layer and a layer mask was added. By painting with a soft black brush, just the parts of the painted texture wanted were left in the image. Lot of fun here!…..Digital Lady Syd
