FINE TEXTURES AND PHOTOGRAPHIC OVERLAYS TO ENHANCE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY AND MORE


Thursday, October 28, 2010

In Print!

No texture recipe today but I thought I'd share my news. I've finally found one of my Getty licensed photos in a use. My pear  photo was used to illustrate a still life tutorial in the recently published  The Complete Photographer  by Tom Ang. Finding my photo in a book was nice but finding it in a photography book was even better.
Click on the photo for a bigger view.


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Saturday, October 23, 2010

Water Meadows


Its a given isn't it, that if you take a trip without your camera, you'll see something so superbly photogenic that you'll bite yourself!
Thus for me, (who's sick of biting himself!) I'll now do no laborious airport run without my camera.
And here's an image to prove my maxim right, as I noticed this as I entered Montpellier's little local airport. I swung the old Volvo around and parked in a lay-by. The setting sun lasting just long enough for me
to take a few dozen join-able shots.

This is composed of three overlapped vertical shots from left to right,
I used Autopano-giga to stitch the images together, ending up with a large 5000 x 5000+ Pixel image. Trees are my favorite subjects to Texture, and Autumnal trees are the best, topped only by trees in the mist for superb texturing.

People ask what kind of picture textures best? And we always say a picture that has some kind of 'softness' about it. Thus we can say Flash photography generally doesn't texture well, and images in very bright sunlight, however I have textured many bright afternoon shots so those rules aren't written in stone!

For this Autumn season we'd like to welcome many new Fly members, brought to us through Tony Sweet and his famous photographic School in America! For their benefit and Justin Cline, Tim Vollmer and John Barclay schools, all hot tagged in the sidebar, and our loyal members, I'll go over a few things we might have said before about basic texturing. For most images I personally start by sorting out a problem sky, I try to balance the top with the darker bottom whenever I can. (btw, get yourself a circular polarized filter, for land and seascapes they are superb!)

Here the sky was very bright, so I doubled the base image and turned the top copy to B/W. I then played with the contrast, darkening certain colours blue mostly with the filter sliders.
When happy I brushed off the darker green part of the image leaving a beefed up sky, made transparent with the Multiply filter @ 54%.
For Autumnal trees, my favorite Flypaper texture has to be from the first Fly pack, Apple Blush.
So I'll always pull this texture up first, thankfully its easy to remember, for trees = Apple Blush!
I normally rotate it until I get the best result, if I have one side too dark,
I'll double it up and flip the top layer, adjusting the opacity, until a happy balance is found.
I could have left it like this, but with the New fly Summer Painterly, we can go further, getting a painterly effect without using photopshops Paint filters, which always degrade an image.

So I applied the rest as follows in the texture recipe below.
Base Image enhanced with a slight HDR effect in the new CS5
Base image B/W copy - Multiply @ 54% Base green part brushed away.
Apple Blush - Soft Light @ 54%
Rose Blush - Overlay @ 87%
Matmos Lake - Desaturated - Soft Light @ 100% Flipped vertically and blurred.
Left hand base corner brushed away as it was getting too dark.
Aquarius - Desaturated - Overlay @ 70%
See a bigger finished version on Flickr
Both this and similar images can be seen on my Photoshelter.

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Friday, October 15, 2010

Ode to Spring


Tulips are such elegant flowers and in a way I'd love to be able to grow them en-masse like this, but massed bedding displays don't really suit my style of gardening as I garden by the "overflowing and abundance" cottage garden method. Thankfully the botanic gardens just down the road has wonderful spring bulb displays so I can get my tulip fix there! I shot this using my trusty 50mm lens at f1.4 for maximum bokeh.
Now the processing....
Brushed rose @ Soft Light 100% I warmed the toning of just this layer to taste using a hue saturation adjustment
Apple Blush @ Soft Light 43% gently removed  from the focus flower using a layer mask
Burnished Clay @ Screen 24% for added softness, once again I removed a little of the texture from the focus flower using a layer mask
Curves adjustment to tweak the contrast a little.

See it on Flickr

Apple Blush is from Tex Box1, Burnished Clay from Tex box 2 and Brushed Rose from the Summer Painterly set.
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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The Black Mill


How do you make a famous much photographed landmark look fresh?
Simple - take a back shot! This huge black Beacon Mill in Rottingdean overlooks the English Channel, when it was built back in 1802, it defiantly faced France, the great Napoleonic foe!
Here these black sentinels are still facing the wind some 200 years later, though now in genteel retirement, their flour grinding days are sadly long gone. This one stands in the rough, on the edge of a charming hilltop golf course. Its funny, but after 100 years of decline windmills are now very much back in fashion!
There used to be many such windmills, now all but a handful survive.
These mills were made famous in a classic Michael Cain Movie;
The Black Mill. The two windmills in that movie are in nearby Brighton.

This image is a composite, a Vertorama made up of 4 landscape format images stacked, overlapping and stitched together using Auto Panopro.
Though the free Autostitch is just as good.
In very high winds its always a good idea to shoot fast as those clouds were whipping by! Shot with a rotating polarizing lens filter.
You'll notice the history plaque has been cloned out on the textured version, as ever, I always try to remove modern day additions from antique structures.

B/W base image copy - Hue @ 35% with added contrast
Apple Blush - Overlay @ 54%
Raw Linen - Soft Light @ 100% Desaturated
Matmos Lake - Soft Light @ 100% Desaturated and flipped vertically
Rose Blush - Soft Light @ 100% slightly Desaturated

Both this and similar images can be seen on my Photoshelter.

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Friday, October 8, 2010

Emerge


I love spring! As well as being beautiful, trees covered with blossom are wonderful to photograph and texture. This is the flowering cherry at our country hut, it was just coming into flower when I took this -unfortunately I've missed seeing it in full bloom this year.
I decided to go for the painterly effect in my processing of this.

I started off by increasing the saturation slightly using a hue saturation adjustment layer.
Aquarius  @ Soft light 100%
Brushed Rose @ Overlay 100%
Then the tone and contrast were tweaked using curves and levels adjustments.

See it a little bigger on Flickr


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Monday, October 4, 2010

Brighton West Pier in Sea Mist


Back in Brighton I took loads of photographs on my late afternoon
visit, walking from one pier to the ruined West Pier. I remembered seeing it before I left England in the 1990's, It was being renovated into a huge restaurant come night club but had mysteriously caught fire.
Today this is all that remains of this Victorian iron construction, impossibly expensive to repair and left to rot gracefully like a whales skeleton.
New plans are afoot to mark its spot by building a huge new 'London Eye' type structure. But for now this wreck is the perfect resting place for migratory starlings!

The first landscape version had already been brightened with Matmos Lake added, flipped vertically and desaturated. Jill suggested it would also be nice cropped square and re-textured. This is the result!

Simple, light processing was called for as there was already quite a lot going on texturally already.
From the Summer Painterly set I used:

Aquarius - Soft Light @ 100% desaturated to a pale blue tone
Brushed Rose - Soft Light @ 100%

A final tweak of the merged image to pull the sky tones together.
This image can be seen on my Photoshelter. Buy prints etc. on my Redbubble

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36 large textures for only $40
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Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges
Add to Cart

Combo Pack Offer
Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two
Add to Cart

Fly Edges Pack
Only $40
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