NKM photos: Capitol

It's Texture Tuesday at the Kim Klassen Café. This week's edition is Pretty in Pink and we need to use the Aurora texture. What, just use one texture? Hmmm, don't think I can do that. How about 4 or 5? Yeah, that sounds better. ☺

This is not a new picture. I shot this in September of 2009 at the Olympia, WA Capitol Grounds. The gardens were lovely and I was aiming for the flowers when the bee just happened to fly by--snap, lucky shot. I've posted the original (cleaned up) on my blog and flickrstream before, but I wanted to try to put a softer spin on it--enter Textures.

Hover your mouse over the picture to see the before.

Here's what I used:

Hue/Saturation Adjustment to desaturate a bit
Nelly Nero - Modfather and turned on the Pop,Brighten and Fade Highlights and Toning layers
Textures: k_canvasbackmagic, Screen, 100%; kk_canvasback, Soft Light, 87%; 3 copies of kk_aurora, Linear Burn, 59%, Soft Light, 24% with an Invert Adjustment Layer at 89%, Multiply, 33%; kk_luminous, Screen, 74%
Then I grouped the texture layers and added a layer mask to bring back a bit of the bee
Solid Color Adjustment Layer, c4d4c3, Multiply, 18%
Solid Color Adjustment Layer, f2ebc6, Soft Light, 64%
The photo frame is from Katie Pertiet from Designer Digitals

Finally, the days where we get (almost) up to the weather we're supposed to be having this time of year, are getting more frequent. Today is actually the second day in a row we can go outside without a jacket on!! Time to clean the yard and garage--but that's another post.

So, last week we had another such day (imagine that!), so we took the opportunity of a couple of hours before picking the kids up from school and went to the capitol in search of some photo ops. Oh, and to try out the new tripods (and heads) we got. We managed to get a few decent shots of the capitol and surrounding area. It was still a little early to get any flowers and I'm not sure they'll be having to many this year given the budget issues.
The picture I'm showing below is a combination of two shots I took; one of them had a better DOF for the background and the other had more of the ledge in focus. I did some basic adjustments in LightRoom and then moved on to Photoshop, where I used a combination of Actions.
I started off with Boost, from the (free) Pioneer Woman Action Set 1 (I seem to always start with that one :D). Then, I used the (also free--yay) Mini Fusion Action from MCP and adjusted the various settings, like contrast, warm tint and then I lightened it a bit.
Then, to bring out the leaf and petal colors on the ledge, I used MCP's Fingerpaint action from the Quickie Collection. Lastly, I added the Dusty vignette from MCP's All in the Details set. And finally, finished it off with the BuildIt Rounded Color Block from MCP's Finish It set. Hmm, can you tell I use a lot of MCP actions? Here is the finished picture.