The Fence

I take a lot of photos out the car window as I'm travelling (as a passenger of course) and this is one of them. I loved the pattern the fences made. The fairly ominous sky did bring rain for which the farmers were very thankful as conditions are very dry in a lot of areas.

Both Paul and I are in Christmas holiday mode at the moment but we'll be back to more regular posting here on the blog soon. And since this will be our last post for the 2010 we'd like to wish you all a Happy New Year!
Now the processing:
Moleskin @ Overlay 35%
Purple Haze @ Soft light 100%
Sariel Leather @ Soft Light 83 % this layer was to give colour solely to the land so was masked from the sky.
Curves layer to tweak tone and contrast.
All textures are from the Summer Painterly pack.
See it on Flickr

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Berry Christmas!

Who needs Christmas decorations when you've got natural ones in the form of berries! These are red currants, the birds get most of the ones on the bushes these days but in the past I've made red currant jelly, ice-cream and even wine!

We'd like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a peaceful and safe Christmas and holiday season and to thank you all for your support over the past year.

A fairly simple texture recipe today as I've been too busy with Christmas preparations to do much photography or texture work.
Iridescent Brush @ Overlay 100%
Iridescent Brush @ Hard Light 67% with a little removed from the focus flowers
Backdrop @ Multiply 100%
Fly Edge #18@ Screen 41% inverted -this adds a subtle grunge to the image.
Iridescent Brush is from the painterly pack, Backdrop from Tex Box 2
See it on Flickr

Summer Painterly Pack

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Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

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Bouquet

As requested by Debbie, here's the recipe for my recent rose image. The photo is of the Cecile Brunner roses once again, and rather than give them the soft treatment I used last time, I decided to go for a more visibly textured look.
The roses by the way are still flowering, might have to go out and pick some for more photos in between Christmas preparations.

So the processing...
Peach Blush @ Hard light 28% desaturated a little
Peach Blush @ Soft Light 38%
Brushed Rose @ Overlay 100%
Brushed Rose @ Soft Light 100%
Levels adjustment to tweak contrast.

Peach Blush is from Tex Box 2, Brushed Rose is from the Painterly set.
See it on Flickr

Summer Painterly Pack

36 large textures for only $40

Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

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Mirage

I never tire of the beach! I visit this city beach on a regular basis and it's different every time I go. On this occasion the sea fog combined with a very low tide provided wonderful shooting conditions, if the sun had peeked through the clouds that would have been the icing on the cake but unfortunately it didn't cooperate.
I've just made a Redbubble Calendar of my Flypaper flowers, perhaps I should do a beach one too :-)

The starting image you see above has already been toned blue using various adjustments.
Then it was texture time...
Pistachio @ Overlay 25%
Lavender Skies @ Soft light 100%
Brushed Rose @ Overlay 68%
Then I merged visible Ctrl -Alt-Shift-E and used the PS5 fake HDR adjustment on the merged layers to enhance contrast and colour.
I then added
Brushed Rose @ Linear light 23% and desaturated a little, removed from the lower portion using a graduated mask.
Curves adjustment to brighten the foreground.

See it on Flickr

Summer Painterly Pack

36 large textures for only $40

Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

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Magpies Gloaming

Complex city skylines are great to photograph, but sometimes focusing on just one tiny corner of a building is enough to suggest an atmosphere. Here, whilst staying with Martine I noticed her Dijon city buildings looked sufficiently different to mine, living in an ancient quarter, to try a few experimental architectural dusk shots.
Simply processed using one Flypaper texture; Matmos Lake, a current favorite, flipped vertically and smoothed, darkened the sky and enriched the tones. Gently brushing the texture from the shaded part of the building helped stop colour noise from developing.

Duplicated base image, CS5 Fake HDR colour slightly brightened copy, smoothed with the CS5 noise filter, Color @ 100%
Matmos Lake - Overlay @ 100% Flipped vertically and horizontally then smoothed with Gaussian Blur @ 100%
Matmos Lake - desaturated - Overlay @ 100% Flipped vertically and horizontally then smoothed with Gaussian Blur @ 100%
Gently brushed away from shaded side if building.
Bird layer from an earlier shot at the same location added and far right chimney removed by cloning tool.
See full sizes on my flickr


On the subject of high places, my current favorite Iphone App is 'Ifall', developed by Josh Kahane, the wunderkind 17 year old son of a UK based photographic Art stock agency.
At just a few cents, this game with its bouncy music blows all the winter blues away!:-)
Click the icon to go to their App page at Apple Mac!

Summer Painterly Pack

36 large textures for only $40

Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

Gift Coupons

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Sweet Peas

Don't sweet peas have the most wonderful fragrance? I wish I could share the scent with you all -as someone on flickr said at times like this we need a scratch and sniff computer screen! I have one of my neighbours to thank for these beauties, they grow in profusion over her fence beside the footpath so I stole a few blooms on my way past.

With the holiday season upon us the  usual problems of finding just the right gift for that special someone we are pleased to announce that we now sell Flypaper Texture Gift Coupons. Share some Flypaper love with a friend.

Okay the processing.
Balthamos Blue @ Soft light 25%
Tarte Tatin @ Overlay 61% toned blue with a hue saturation adjustment and removed from the focus flowers.
Stamp visible by pressing Ctrl-Alt -Shft -E on a PC (on a Mac it will be similar)
Change the opacity of that layer to Soft light @ 18%
Luminescent @ Screen 18% removed from the focus flowers with a layer mask.
Luminescent @ Hard light 25%

And it was done! The change is fairly subtle but it's all you need sometimes. See it  on Flickr

Summer Painterly Pack

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Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

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English golf course

Back in England, I was held up by gales and so missed the leaf-peak by a few days, but rushed out on the first early morning after the wind had ripped away half of the golden leaves I'd gone over to capture. The golfers were only too happy to inform me I'd just missed the best of the leaf peak!
This is one of the best of a bunch, taken on a hilltop golf course in Surrey. The dark corners are from the polarizer, I've still not worked out how to automatically remove them from my new Canon D5 mark II camera, any suggestions would be most welcome!

Processing was very easy, first I chose Matmos Lake to darken the sky, flipped vertically and desaturated then blurred, twice.
I then used Rose Blush painterly effect, desaturated and a second layer in full colour to finish.

Matmos Lake - Soft Light @ 100% flipped vertically and desaturated
Matmos Lake - Soft Light @ 100% flipped vertically and desaturated
Rose Blush - Soft Light @ 100% desaturated, bottom edge lightly brushed away.
Rose Blush - Overlay @ 100%
See it bigger on Flickr
See it even bigger on black on Flickr

Summer Painterly Pack

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Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

See all our packs and deals on one Page

Hoody that caused a rumpus!

I'm delighted to be able to share my latest image which caused one sad individual on Flickr to accuse me of copying his work! Its also in answer to Bobs question showing how we create fake mist with just our flypaper textures. My original goal was just to achieve a nice image of an English woodland walk, you'll remember I had the PL filter stuck-on so the original image was a little dark.
To counter this I added Apple blush and Raw Linen in soft light @ 100% both from Pack one. I then used Matmos Lake, flipped vertically and desaturated, and blurred to darken the blown-out sky a little.
Here I could have stopped, but it was as they say, a beautifully polished turd! It was OK but uninteresting.

So, after a coffee break an idea came, I'd not liked the end of the avenue, as those two trees ruined it and I also wanted to hide the houses.
This mist idea came about just to obscure the end, so I chose Iorek Ice, blurred it slightly @ 100% and rubbed out everything but a cone shape to fill the end, I blurred more and it spread out, I doubled it up, again and again, adding more and more layers. I then remembered I had a Man Ray contest I should close back on Flickr, and the final idea came to me, the Wolf of the woods! I added the hoody figure I'd previously donated and Voila!
To ground him I added two blurred shadows as the light wasn't really defined in the mist and buried these layers under more layers of mist. Here I could have stopped, it was again ok, but looked kinda flat and gray. So I tried the old Crossed-Processing look I'd used for another couple of pictures. First I flattened the image and saved, then doubled the base, and to the top layer I moved the color sliders until it looked a bright green/blue.

Here's the science bit!
Iorek Ice Screen @ 34% middle of image only edges brushed away and blurred 100%
Iorek Ice Screen @ 52% middle of image only more edges brushed away and blurred 100%
Iorek Ice Screen @ 34% tunnel cone shape opening only, edges brushed away and blurred 100%
Iorek Ice Screen @ 52% tunnel cone shape opening only, edges brushed away and blurred 100%
Iorek Ice Screen @ 52% tunnel cone shape opening only, edges brushed away and blurred 100%
Hooded figure cut-out Luminosity @ 100%
Iorek Ice Screen @ 52% tunnel cone shape opening only, edges brushed away and blurred 100%
Hooded figure copy, flipped upside down and pulled under the first figure to create a shadow, distort shadow with perspective filter.
Shadow, Multiply @ 40%
Shadow Copy pull out of shape and blur slightly Multiply @ 49%
Dorian Gray - Hard light @ 42%
Iorek Ice - Color @ 70% This blanches all the colour from the image.
Iorek Ice Screen @ 32% from top of trees to bottom, but edges brushed away and blurred 100%
Flatten all and save.

Final version after part 2..

Part Two.
Base image in finished state.
Base image copy, Hard Light bright blue colour altered version @ 17%
Balthamos Blue - Soft Light @ 100% Dark edges brushed away from images dark bottom corners
Base image in finished state copied - Soft Light @ 27% just to tone down the bright blue and add more earthy green tones.

Summer Painterly Pack

36 large textures for only $40

Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

See all our packs and deals on one Page