I still have lots of images to process from my North Carolina trip but I liked this one for its lines and colors. Lots of shrimp boats in the harbors and lots of ways to portray them artistically. Post processing involved opening up the shadows and adding saturation and sharpening.
I’ve been working on digital art this week. The weather has not been too cooperative for getting out to photograph. I’m getting better at blending and adding water color edges. The photo is from Santa Fe. I just felt like giving it a French name.
So, the technique here, in Photoshop, is to mask out the entire image then stamp it back in with water color brushes using white on the mask. I also applied a blending mode which is how the wall behind the bicycle got blended into the background. Looking at it now I think maybe I should have expanded the image a little toward the upper left.
I was working on a web gallery of my Cuba images yesterday and came across this one that I hadn’t done anything with. I loved the colors of the paddle boats and the water but they were a little dirty and grungy so I decided to try a painterly treatment in Topaz Impression which I love. I also cropped in quite a bit to get rid of distractions in the background and make it all about the bands of color.
I’m not sure if this is the original hood ornament that went with this car. I noticed in Cuba that hood ornaments were often not consistent with the vintage of the car and in some cases old hood ornaments were mounted on top of the original. For example I saw one jaguar on top of a 1950s chevy with an airplane ornament. In any case, I think we should bring back the hood ornament, they just add such panache to the cars. In this case the gold painted host car and it’s orange neighbor offered up a palette that could only be found in Cuba.
Not much post processing required. Some de-noising and sharpening and maybe a little vibrance and saturation.
On my way back from a photography workshop in Olympic National Park last month my instructors put me on to some places in Astoria to shoot grunge abstracts. Too much fun and too little time. I am just getting around to processing some of the images. This one is from one of the WWII bunkers at Ft. Stevens State Park. The concrete walls have layers of different colored paint and streaks of rust contributing to the design. The challenge for the photographer is to find and frame an interesting composition in the dark and spooky tunnels. I did add quite a bit of saturation in this one to make it more colorful and interesting. Also 60% detail in color effect pro to bring out the texture of the concrete.
I’ve been working on ways to blend images and add text. In this one I took and image of some black-eyed susans and added a texture layer. I still wasn’t satisfied but in some of the blending modes the flowers went monochrome and that looked interesting to me so I made a sepia tone layer and blended it in as a sort of border. I liked the look and added some simple text just naming the flowers.
I don’t know if 
anyone noticed but I was so busy keeping up with my travel blog that I did not get an image of the week posted. I am only just starting to shift gears from documenting my trip to creating art so here is an early attempt that was shot last week in Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland. There is a lot worthy of photographing in Ireland and being tied to a tour bus is not the best way to go about it. But, I fear I would not be able to drive on the left side of the road and I’m a little too old for hitchhiking so short of hiring a driver I’m not sure how to make it happen.
In any case, I liked the colors of the mountains and the field in this one. I tried it as an impressionist painting but I liked a little more realism so ended up with a texture effect that gave it a border and helped to emphasize the stone church.
There’s not a whole lot of grunge left in Ashland’s now trendy Railroad District but there is one building down about 1st and A that has corrugated iron in all stages of rustiness with old wood underneath and patches on the patches. And a kind of spooky face painted on one side. I just keep going back for more.
I was working on culling the files this week and came across this one from my June trip to the coast that I had processed in Topaz Impression. It just made me go Oh, Wow, I really like that so I thought I would make it the image of the week since I have mostly been working on learning new tricks in Photoshop but do not yet have a lot to show for it.
Here’s something a little different. I have been doing an online course in Photoshop Artistry and came up with this impression of Portland from my recent visit. I started with a skyline image taken from the Pittock mansion then added an image from my files of a rain streaked window. Then I did a selection of the umbrella man at Pioneer Courthouse square. I added a rose from the International Rose Test Garden for the city of Roses using a gradient mask to blend it in without obscuring the skyline. Finally, just in case you didn’t recognize it I put in a selection from the Portland theater sign. Not bad for a beginner.