One Photo Focus – July 2016

July 1, 2016 by lauramacky 52 Comments

It’s One Photo Focus time! I rather enjoy this challenge of taking someone’s photo and editing it into our own creation. Thank you Bren Ryan for providing this week’s original photo. It was a good one! I’d love it if you checked out Bren’s work when you have time too. And as always, thank you Stacy for coordinating this challenge especially when we all know how busy you’ve been! Please check out the entire the entire challenge with everyone’s edits on Stacy’s blog by clicking here.

I’m back to my painterly ways for this one. 🙂 The result consists of three parts: Castle, Wisteria and Sky. Since Bren lives in England I tried to go with the image by putting some english flowers in the foreground to create some depth. You’ll laugh but I googled “english flowers” because I wasn’t sure what to put there. I found an archway of wisteria in a free image so I went with that; and I have no idea if that’s a typical English flower but let’s pretend it is lol.

The Process:

1. Imported my sky image, free wisteria image and Bren’s original into Lightroom and adjusted each image for highlights, shadows, etc. Also adjusted verticals of the castle.

2. Opened all three as layers in one Photoshop document.

3. Masked all three so that they all appeared together then combined everything onto a new layer. This is the part that took the most time.

4. Since the path and stone to the left of the path were grey on the wisteria image, I used the color picker to select the castle burnt red color and applied that as an overlay blend mode at reduced opacity to the path and stone to the left of the path so that they matched the castle.

5. Used Topaz Impression (argh I can’t remember which preset and I forgot to label it). I adjusted this preset to reduce contrast, paint overlay and saturation for the yellow, red and green colors.

6. Reduced vibrance of the green foliage via PS vibrance layer mask.

7. For a touch of a faded look, I used Nik Analog Efex Camera 6 where I made some adjustments to this preset and created a new layer in PS. I then masked out certain areas to create better dynamics.

8. Used a wet media brush to soften edges here and there.

Hope you enjoy it!