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
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!
