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 Photo Focus – April 2016

For those of you who don’t know this challenge, it consists of everyone editing the same photo taken by one person.  Below you’ll find my image as well as the original image provided by Cee Neuner.  Thanks much to Cee for the original image.  I really loved working on it!  Please do check out Stacy’s blog when you have time to see everyone’s submissions.  It’s always fun to see everyone’s edits!

Basic Process:

• Used Lightroom to make basic adjustments to balance out light and shadows
• Removed Power pole and lines using healing brush in photoshop
• Added curve to sky
• Added a tree using a tree brush in the background to cover up vacancy left by the bottom of the pole
• Added a tractor
• Used Macphun Filter calm day at a reduced opacity to get the general tone
• Used Topaz Glow for detail in some areas like the flowers around the barn, the grass and the wood
• Used Topaz Impression very lightly to make it look more painterly
• Added a little bit of light in the sky right above the tractor
• Adjusted colors using layers in Photoshop

Edit by Lauramacky

Original by Cee Neuner

One Photo Focus – February

For those of you who don’t know this challenge, it consists of everyone editing the same photo taken by one person.  Below you’ll find my image as well as the original image provided by Lens Addiction.   I will say this one was a real challenge for me and I almost gave up.

To see everyone’s submissions, please check out Stacy’s blog when you have time.  It’s always fun to see everyone’s edits!

Basic Process:

• Straightened image and removed two ropes in front (just because I wanted to use the patch tool lol)
• Isolated the sky and applied a color fill to add a yellow tone and remove the cloud contrast
• Added a levels mask to the boat hull to bring out the detail
• Applied Topaz Glow for a sketchy look
• Applied Topaz Impression for some smudges here and there
• Adjusted colors via hue/saturation mask
• Added two textures using two layers with masks to reveal parts of the image
• Added blur at top and bottom
• Dodged and burned a few areas in the sky

macky-onephotofocus-feb

Original by Stacy of Lens Addiction