Hair New Era

As usual I am late for Photo Art Friday (yes, I know it's Sunday), but better late than never. For this week, Bonnie asked us to share a piece of photo art where we use one of her textures and then use a layer mask to finesse the texture application. It was quite a challenge, but I think I managed not too bad.


I used Bonnie's texture "desert canvas" in blending mode soft light at 100% and then used a layer mask in PSE to remove most of the texture from the tulips and their leaves. After that the tulips received some of the texture back, but lighter than before. It wasn't that difficult after all, it just takes some time and I had a harder time to decide when I was actually finished.

Bonnie's challenges help me to learn using PSE more and more efficiently, and I am very happy about that. Recently I have also taken more "still life" photos which is new to me and I haven't practiced very often. It actually also helps me to take better product pictures of the items for my Etsy store which is important to me.

I am also linking this to Life in Pictures at Coston Comba Photography, a photo blog I have just discovered.
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A few days ago I played around with Scrabble tiles, chocolate hearts, a photo studio set up (improvising, of course) and my camera. When I uploaded these two pictures to Photoshop I further added texture and played around with a gradient - first time. I can't decide which one I like better - so I ask you: Which one of these two photos do you prefer, focused on the chocolate hearts or focused on the Scrabble tiles?


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One morning I looked at the smoketree at my frontdoor and saw all these beautiful dew drops on it - of course I had to take a picture. And of course I had to add some texture!

Here's the "recipe":
- Levels adjustment
- Bonnie's texture "artist's easel" in blending mode color burn at 47% opacity
- copied it in blending mode soft light at 47% opacity
- some adjustment in hue/saturation and brightness
- Bonnie's texture "goodness" in blending mode vivid light in 55% opacity
- and a final levels adjustment

I love how the drops stand out and almost glow.

I'm linking this to Photo Art Friday - really really late this time (I missed it last week...)
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This year I'm taking Kim Klassen's e-course "Beyond Layers" which will be a yearlong journey. I am quite excited about it and wonder where this will get me. This past week had been very busy, so only today I started to work on some images for the course.

This week's theme was "just enough" - simplicity in photos. Something I admire and I want to achieve with a good part of my pictures, but so far haven't always been very good at. I looked through my archives and found two images that I once edited a bit (you can see them here and here) and today edited again.


First I did some levels and hue/saturation adjustments. Then I added Kim's texture "awaken", blending mode soft light at 72%. After a brightness adjustment I first eliminated the yellows and cranked up the saturation adjustment.


With this image of a light hanging from the ceiling in a mosque in Cairo I also started with some levels adjustment (this is a scanned slide). I added Kim's texture "papergrunge" at 100% soft light, then copied it, multiply at 74% and did some hue/saturation adjustments.

It was fun editing some images I already had processed in a certain way and now try a different approach. This can get pretty addicting.

Is anybody of you taking this course?

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Bonnie's challenge for this week's Photo Art Friday was something that connects to the number 3/three. Not only will you see three of my photos here, but each shows three of something - deck chairs, sail boats and trees.


This picture - originally a slide, like the two others as well -was taken at the beach in Brighton, England. It was a windy, partly cloudy day, and almost no one was sitting in these chairs. However, they had something very optimistic about them the way they were patiently waiting for guests to lounge there despite the English moody weather. The texture applied here is Kim Klassen's "warmsun", blending mode linear burn at 50% and copied once with some adjustments (levels, saturation, brightness).


With these sail boats - shot at the coast of Cornwall, England - I went a little bit bolder. The picture was taken in the evening with the sun already gone, but the clouds were still pink and the mood was nice, but quite dark. The original picture is a little bit dull, so I thought some "pepper" can't hurt. I first applied Bonnie's texture "dappled dawn", blending mode exclusion at 90%; did some hue/saturation adjustments; applied Bonnie's texture "mauve magic", blending mode color dodge at 25%; some more saturation and brightness adjustments; and finally I cropped the photo a little bit more. I'm in love with the color!


Finally trees - of course! Again, we are in the Swabian mountains in Germany on a cold winter day, a very cloudy day I should add, the original photo is just dark. I cropped it down to three trees; did a levels adjustment to brighten it up a little bit; applied Bonnie's "edited acrylics" (one of my favorite textures) in blending mode pin light at 85% with some saturation adjustments. I only used a part of the texture, the upper left hand corner, and I thought how interesting it looks when you drag out the texture.

What I really like about these challenges is that I try something new - blending modes I usually ignore, or playing around with the texture first before applying it. Every time I realize how much I still have to learn, but I love, love, love it.

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First, I thank all of you who read and commented on my last post - it does mean a lot to me, and your encouragement is highly appreciated. You are the best, and I feel lucky to have fantastic blogging buddies as you are. Thank you!!!

So, here is the Photo Art Friday challenge again - I found this not too long ago, and at the beginning I was a bit intimidated by all the great work that you can see there. But then I thought "oh what the heck" and just participated last week for the first time. It gives me a good excuse to play around with textures and my photos and just change things up a little bit. It is so much fun and when I'm editing in PSE I forget about time.

For this week I picked the photo of a barn that I took a year ago in British Columbia. We were staying with our relatives in Summerland and visited a winery nearby (excellent Riesling!) where we also had lunch. From the patio you had this beautiful view over the vineyards to the barn.


 However, I think the photo looks a bit flat and I certainly didn't like the blue and black bins behind the barn. So convenient that we can just eliminate these things! This is what it looks like after I spiced it up a little bit:


I first did a levels adjustment and then added two Kim Klassen textures, "dusty rose" (multiply 63%) and "warm sun" (linear burn 50%) - that's it. I like the warmer colors and the "rusty" feeling.

I link this up to Photo Art Friday at Bonnie's blog. There are many other fascinating photos to see - come over and take a look!

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Thanks to Nancy at  A Rural Journal I found Bonnie's fantastic textures at her Pixel Dust Photo Art website. Bonnie offers some free textures that I downloaded, but she also sells her texture collections, and I can honestly tell you that they are yummy.

I was immediately tempted to try these textures out. I took a photo of my Mr. Lincoln rose and added Bonnie's texture "french script on parchment", blending mode soft light (100%), copied it and set blending mode to pin light at 48%. I quite like it. It's always fun to play around in Photoshop Elements.

I'm linking this to Nancy's "Your Sunday Best". You can also win Bonnie's texture collection on that site since Nancy is having a giveaway.

OK, my picture is not "over" the rainbow... This is Inspiration Avenue's weekly challenge, and it took me a while to find something appropriate. I finally came up with this end of the rainbow that we saw in Yellowstone a few years ago. What fascinated me about it was its fiery appearance, it looked like fire was falling out of the sky. It does match those burnt trees in the foreground, doesn't it? I intensified it a little bit in Photoshop Elements and added a Kim Klassen texture "dusty rose" and this is the result.

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A church during the week in a small village on the Northern isle of Sylt. It's a Protestant church as most of the churches in the Northern part of the country are. The red book is the book of hymns, ready for the next church service on Saturday evening or Sunday morning.

The light was pretty bad when I took this picture, so I worked in Photoshop and added two textures by Kim Klassen, first "Silence" and then "Sweet Treat". It gives the church a welcoming warmth.

If you have anything German to share, please leave a link in the comments and we will come and visit.

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