Happy New Year!

Beach Art

 

A recent walk at the beach yielded lots of photos, as usual.  I edited them all in Photoshop, but some I took to a more "arty" level.  Above is a before picture.

 

 

The after-bird.  ;O)  This one included adding a texture layer.

 

 



Before - a view along the shore.

 

 

After - Painterly effect, plus I changed the proportions by switching the numbers for width and height.

 

 

Before shows a fisherman in the surf.  It was a rough water day - a couple days after Hurricane Sandy passed offshore - and I was glad this fellow was wearing yellow, in case he got knocked down!

 

 

After is from a slightly different angle.  I had zoomed in on both pictures, so they were already a little rough-looking.  On this one, I used some artistic filters, including dry brush, to get a painterly effect.

 

 

Before - some beach houses.

 

 

After - renovated to accomodate tall, cartoon people.  I used an artistic filter called cutout, and also went overboard with the hue/saturation.

 

Simple Seagull

I've begun a course called Beyond Layers.  Today's project was to use a texture layer provided by Kim Klassen, and use it in simplifying a photograph.

This is my original photograph taken of a gull hanging out at the beach.  In Photoshop, I made a duplicate layer of the original.  On the duplicate layer, I used Color Balance and adjusted Cyan to -50.  I added Kim's "awaken" texture layer using soft light at 100%.  I felt this made the gull too pale, so I used the eraser tool on the texture layer.  I worked at 25% opacity, and ended up doing it three times, so I guess that would equal using the eraser tool at 75% opacity.  Next, I flattened the image.  My last step was to adjust the mid levels from 1.00 to 0.75.

I've used this photograph of this gull before - maybe he deserves a name?  Let's try Gunther, that seems to suit him!  Here's a link to my earlier post when Gunther was used with a more pronounced texture layer, as well as a layer that was a photograph of ocean waves.  That time I used hard light instead of soft light.  Today's image is definitely more subtle.

Photo du Jour - Neon Gull

Remember the Reserved Parking photo from a few days ago?  Cropped to get just the gull and sign, and used the Photoshop filter called Glowing Edges.  Silly, but fun!

Sponge Birds

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

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Bye.

Flying High

I've mentioned that I don't have much success taking pictures of gulls in flight. While this bird was flying around, I was snapping pictures like crazy with my digital camera, without even knowing if the bird was in the viewfinder. When I got home and put all my new photos into Photoshop, I was more that pleased to see that not only had I captured the gull, but that the moon was in the same picture. I cropped the above photo - there was LOTS of extra sky in the original picture. The images below are the results of my efforts in Photoshop. You can click on the pictures to see enlarged versions.

When I save a new image as a .jpeg, I try to add all the filter information in my image title. Some of the titles get pretty long! This image was mostly "texture/grain" and "stylize/diffuse."

The main filter for this image was "artistic/fresco." Wouldn't this picture make a cool art quilt?

For this picture, I started by adjusting "auto levels" and then played with Image-Adjust-Curves. I've only found out about Curves recently. You put your mouse on a line in a graph and drag it around while you watch really cool things, in terms of color and light/darkness, happen to your image.

For this last image, I used Image/Adjust/Equalize; then Image/Adjust/Posterize (set at 8); than Image/Adjust/Hue-Saturation (I set Hue to -160, Saturation to +20, and Lightness to -30.) And, yes, code for all that information is in the title of the .jpeg!

Beach Art

Late one evening I headed out to a beach near Ft. Macon in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. I took several pictures with my digital camera, and then played with them in Photoshop when I got home. I like to get a "painterly" look, so I use a variety of Photoshop filters.

One of my goals in life is to get a decent picture of a gull in flight. Usually when one flies overhead, my camera is in my pocket. When I have my camera in hand, it's still a major challenge because it's not like the gulls glide slowly by to have their picture taken. When a gull is flying around, I snap as many pictures as I can. I figure that the law of averages dictates that I will occasionally get a bird in one of my pictures. This bird was in the distance, but still, I take what I can get!

I guess I could call this photo "Casting a Long Shadow." Very cliche, but it was my first time trying this. Happily, I think it made me look thinner....

Right after I took this picture, the young man caught a fish. It was one of those ugly-looking flat fish - don't know what they're called, but it was about a foot long, and he was well pleased with his catch.

Unlike the gulls, the surf is always happy to put on a good show for the camera! I took several other pictures on this evening, and plan to post them in my next couple blogs. They're a bit more "far-out" and I'll be including the original shots so that you can see where they're coming from.