Wednesday's Work - It's Finished!!

I asked Ed to hold the afghan for me. He's 6'1" so that gives you a good idea of how big this thing is. This is a shot of the front of the afghan.

This is the back. Just wanted to point out that I've sewn in all two or three thousand loose ends that were on the back of the afghan.

View standing on a chair. I single-crocheted around the edge of the afghan with brown yarn.

Distorted view....

Flossie Frogg, sunbathing on the beach. My plushies have expressed their approval.

Bathing Beauty with a close-up of the hexagons.

Friendly Flowers

There's an outdoor market in town called Friendly Market. (At the corner of Bridges and Friendly - must have been pretty easy to pick the name!)

I was walking past the market on Sunday and, even though it was closed and no people were around, there was table after table of pots of flowers alongside the bike path.

It pleases me that we live in a place where flowers can safely be left out in the open! I suppose the only people who would want the flowers would be gardeners, and they're probably generally honest people anyway.

I had my camera with me and took almost 90 photos.
This is a selection from my favorites of the day.

When I was working on the photos in Photoshop, I couldn't resist using the sponge filter on some of them. The following images show that painterly effect.

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Sunday's Summary

Photoshop's Sponge Filter was pure pleasure to learn and use. Seeing my photographs turn into Impressionist watercolors was a real treat! I'll be playing with a different Photoshop technique, starting tomorrow.

Sponge Filter and Hue-Saturation were used to produce this digital image of blue flowers. I love the colors!

This is the picture I worked with - it's a detail cropped from an original photograph.

Sponge Beach

More of my photographs that I altered using Photoshop's Sponge Filter. Yes, I did get a little carried away with this technique.

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The end. :o)

Sponge Birds

I took some of my favorite photographs of seabirds and used Photoshop's Sponge Filter on them.

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Bye.

Lovely Day!

Ed, Casey Cockatiel, and Big Louie on deck enjoying the warm Spring weather.

Sponge Boats

Before (Photos altered with Photoshop's Sponge Filter and Hue/Saturation)


After

Before

After (my favorite of these three)

Before

After

These photos were taken in Beaufort, North Carolina.

Wednesday's Work - Ever More Strange

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Learning Something New

While I use Photoshop all the time, there are lots of tricks and techniques I've never learned. I've purchased several books on painting and design using Photoshop, and the books look really nice on my bookshelf.... So I've decided it's time to expand my digital horizons. Each week (starting this week) I plan to study a technique in Photoshop to add it to my repertoire. This week's project is the Sponge Filter. Above is a finished image and below is the photo I used.

In this scene, the trees were reflected beautifully in the oh-so-still water. The pansies (yesterday), the red shack on Sunday, and the cows on Saturday were all done using the Sponge Filter. When using this filter, there are three sliding scales, one representing brush size, one for definition, and one for smoothness. What I found was that I needed to have all three scales set on their smallest numbers to get a decent-looking image. I used "one" on each scale for the first image. I played around with several combinations and here are a couple of examples:

Each scale for this image was set at "three."

When I set all three scales at "nine," this abstract image emerged. I also checked all of my Photoshop books to see what the authors did with the Sponge Filter. I can summarize that in a single word - Nothing! Maybe this filter was considered too simple for elaboration, but anyway, I experimented on my own.

This image is cropped from the photograph above, and then treated in Hue/Saturation to alter the colors.

When I applied the Sponge Filter to it, I got this lovely watercolor image. I'll continue playing with Sponge for the rest of this week, then pick something new to try for next week.

Monday's Magic - Pansies

I love the look of a watercolor painting! I wanted to be able to reproduce this effect in Photoshop, working with my photographs. What I found was that an artistic filter called "sponge" gave me the results I wanted. The first picture is the finished digital image.


This second image is the cropped section of the photograph that I used.


And this last photo is the original picture of the pansies. I loved their orange color!

Sunday's Shot - Red Shack

A digital painting of one of my photographs.

Detail

And the original photo.