One Photo Focus – November 2016

It’s One Photo Focus time!  We were provided a beautiful image from Julie Powell to edit this month.  Thanks Julie!  This was a beautiful image to work on.  Honestly I looked at it and thought, it’s perfect as it is!  I love Julie’s photography and her artful creations, so I hope you all check out her blog.  I think you’ll like what you see there.

Thanks to Stacy for coordinating this challenge!  Please check out the entire the entire challenge with everyone’s edits on Stacy’s blog by clicking here.

The Process  – Screenshot of Photoshop Layers is also attached:

1.  Imported into Lightroom and slightly straightened the image so the bottle could be exactly vertical then opened in Photoshop.

2.  In Photoshop I created color fill layer masks for the flowers, vase, and chair.  Used a level adjustment mask for the leaves to brighten them up.

3.  Used a clipping noise gradient mask over the chair to make it “not so perfect”.

4.  Added a texture as a layer, reduced opacity to 77% and masked out the flower, and some of the bottle and chair.

5.  Used a pattern fill with a blending mode of “lighter color” over the entire image.  You can also think of this as applying a texture over the entire image.  Reduced opacity to 70% and fill to 36%

6.  Added a brightness layer except for the bottle which I masked out.

7.  Added a ND gradient filter at the bottom right-hand corner of the image to dry your eye more to the chair.

8.  Added a curves layer to further brighten things up.

9.  Added a Hue/Saturation layer and reduced the saturation of the red just a bit.

10. Added a levels mask to increase lights and reduce blacks just a bit.

Hope you enjoy it!

OPF – November 2016 – Edited by Laura Macky

Julie Powell’s Original

 

Screenshot of Photoshop Document

Advertisement

One Photo Focus – October 2016

It’s One Photo Focus time!  I rather enjoy this challenge of taking someone’s photo and editing it into our own creation.  This month it’s something a bit different!  We were provided a cell phone image from Y. Prior from Priohouse to edit either on our phones or on our computers.  I chose to edit it on my iPhone 6+.  Most of you who know me, know that sometimes I enjoy taking pictures on my phone and editing them on a myriad of apps I have.  I will say this was the hardest image I’ve ever worked on.  I think it didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped but I had fun anyway.

With most of my cell phone photos, I use multiple apps to to achieve the final look.  Sometimes I move in and out of them so fast I forget what I’ve done to tell you the truth.  I tried remembering what I did and I think I remembered the main edits.

And as always, a huge thank you Stacy for coordinating this challenge and putting a different twist on it this month!  Please check out the entire the entire challenge with everyone’s edits on Stacy’s blog by clicking here.

The Process:

1.  Imported the image to my phone and used the SKWRT app which I just discovered and I love!  This app can correct verticals on the phone just as if I’m in photoshop.  Well, almost.  😉   So that’s what I did first with this app.

2.  I cloned out those vertical lines at the bottom…not exactly sure what that was but I kept thinking luggage handles!

3.  There is a sister app to SKWRT called MRRW which is sort of embedded in the SKWRT app and I used that to mirror the image in order to eliminate the red chair to the right and to make everything symmetrical.  You’ll notice that the original image showed a beige chair along with the black chair on the right side of the couch as we look at it.  On my image, after using MRRW, you’ll see that the beige chair is gone because it took the left half of the image and duplicated it on the right.

4.  I then imported the image into iColorama to apply some color effects, add sharpening and a vignette so make the middle brighter than the edges.  I also applied less contrast to the outside of the image than the center so that the center popped a bit.

Hope you enjoy it!

Laura Macky Edit

 

Original by Y. Prior

One Photo Focus – July 2016

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!

English Impression – Edited by Laura Macky

 

Original by Bren Ryan