I dream in Textures

Another week has gone by and another fabulous texture found its way to my collection by way of Kim Klassen's Texture Tuesday email. This time I have two pictures that I think work well with this new texture called Dream.
The first picture is of a Seagull, which I had already been working on with other textures. The dream texture just seemed like the icing on the cake. Hmmm, cake. Sorry, I got temporarily distracted. Speaking of cake, I made some yummy cake pops this weekend. You can see pictures and how-to's on my personal blog (not that this blog isn't personal, but more photography oriented, where my personal blog is, well...personal, you know?)
Anyway, back to textures. Here is the Seagull--if you hover your mouse over the picture, you'll see the original.

Here is a screen-shot of the layers and settings for this image. I used the dream and grannyscupboard textures as well as a lovely overlay from Vera Lim:

And 'cause it was so much fun, I had to do another one. What do you think? 

I was going to put the layer screen-shot here as well, but it turned out to be quite long. Let me know in your comments if you'd like to see it and I'll try to stitch it together from multiple screen-shots.
Make sure you stop by the Texture Tuesday Page and check out all the beautiful entries.

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Soft and Faded

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:

1. Hue/Saturation Adjustment to desaturate a bit
2. Nelly Nero - Modfather and turned on the Pop,Brighten and Fade Highlights and Toning layers
3. 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%
4. Then I grouped the texture layers and added a layer mask to bring back a bit of the bee
5. Solid Color Adjustment Layer, c4d4c3, Multiply, 18%
6. Solid Color Adjustment Layer, f2ebc6, Soft Light, 64%
7. The photo frame is from Katie Pertiet from Designer Digitals

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Deep Thoughts

I discovered this really cool website, Kim Klassen Cafe, which is a fabulous resource of tutorials, textures, and photography tips. Every Tuesday, there is a Texture challenge, which invites people to link to their creations using one or more of Kim's wonderful Textures and encourages them to check out and comment on others' work. I love communities like this; they give you an opportunity to view so many other talented peoples' pictures and be inspired in your own work.

So, this is my first time participating in Texture Tuesday and I was excited to try out two textures, Golden and LifesGood. You can download these by signing up for the Texture Lovin' List. I used a picture of my daughter, Katie, from 2009. Not the best and sharpest, but I really love the concentration on her face and the pose and casual look. It just looked perfect for texture application.

I did some cleanup in Lightroom and then switched it to black and white. Then, in Photoshop, I added both Textures with these adjustments:
LifesGood, Overlay, 42% Opacity, Golden, Soft Light, 91% Opacity. I added Layer Masks to both texture Layers and very slightly brushed over the face with a soft, very low opacity brush. Then I ran Sharp People from the MCP Quickie Collection. Lastly, I applied a frame from  OnOne's PhotoFrame (the free version) and that's it. Roll your mouse over the picture to see the before.

 

 

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My very Professional (not!) photo shoot and final picture How-To

I haven't had much opportunity to use the new tripod, so yesterday I decided to use the potted Campanula Get Mee's (ok, I didn't know this, I read the label) I picked up at the store last week and take some close-ups.

I love this texture tutorial at the Flypaper Textures site and wanted to see if I can get similar results using my own textures. Well, I didn't really have any of my own textures yet; I just started creating my own and the few I have were more of the darker/grungy variety, so they wouldn't work for this light, dreamy type of look.

Well, not to worry, being the Packrat that I am, which, in photography, translates into my having a hard time rejecting and deleting any bad or blurry shots without thinking "hmmm, if I just use this corner of the picture, I can get some cool background/texture, etc. which I can then use for something else", I had just that--some really nice, dreamy, blurry, colorful parts of otherwise less than optimal (i.e. crappy) shots.
This is what the finished picture looks like.

If you'd like to know how I did it, read on:

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Grunge Mix - Vintage

Grunge Mix - Vintage, a photo by scrapgeek/NKMphotos on Flickr.

I spent some time today going through different tutorials for creating textures. One great one I found was Evolution of a Texture. I followed most of the instructions and interpreted others for my own use. I like the way they came out. This article definitely gave me ideas and I can't wait to try out other techniques. I made 5 textures in different shades, all are available to download on my flickr page.

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