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

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One ringy dingy….

About eight years ago my hubby and I went to England for the marriage of his daughter to our now son-in-law.  They lived in a quaint town called Coggeshall in Essex.  I wish I had been into photography back then because the place where they had the wedding was amazing!

I wanted to purchase a little something from the town to bring home and display in my hutch where I keep small things we’ve purchased from places we’ve traveled.  Back then, the prices in England were outrageous as compared to the American dollar, so every time I picked something up, I’d remark that it was double what it would cost in the states.  That prevented me from doing much shopping which my hubby, I’m sure, was eternally grateful.  🙂

I did fancy this cute little English phone though.   I couldn’t resist.  It’s a tiny little box actually.  I should’ve taken a shot with it open, but it’s much prettier this way.