Voyage through canal mist

A big thanks to Ellen for her kind texture feature on dpreview
and a warm welcome to their visiting fans!

Once again its the time of year for my favorite misty, foggy mornings in the Mediterranean! As soon as I open my shutters and spy mist outside, I need to work fast, as the sun tends to burn it off soon after 9 am.
This time I just drove to the edge of town to our famous Canal du Midi, which connects the Atlantic on the west coast to our local oyster beds at Sete edging the French Mediterranean. This part of the canal is the last high point before the famous series of ancient locks take barges and pleasure boats down to sea level and just a few miles on to the salt water Oyster lagoons and open seas. Thus this stretch of canal is very wide for the high season boat jams, as only a few can be taken down to sea level at the same time.

One great thing I discovered this week from Flickr was how good the Camera Raw program is for getting rid of Chromatic Aberration, I tend to see it mostly on tree branches with pale skies behind at the edges of images, when pushing the image in photoshop using the CS5 HDR program these effects are multiplied tenfold and its always been a problem even with expensive lenses such as my 24-105mm canon all-rounder lens. However after sorting this out in camera raw, I can now carry on without those nasty problem effects!

The base image has already been treated in Nik Color Efex pro-4 - Contrast color range - with the slider moved towards the red end of the spectrum, this zings up the leaves and grass, helping to wake-up the images full potential.

I then thought I'd try the Painterly textures, as mist is often a drab grey colour, it needed some nice pastel warm tones to help balance the bright colour from the right hand side of the image.
When using textures on mist its a good idea not to use a hard setting like 'Overlay' as this can make your mist disappear!
So I suggest Soft Light is used on Mist;

Brushed Rose - Soft Light @ 100% Flipped Horizontally and vertically
Pantheon Stone - Soft Light @ 85%

After which, to give the image a point of focus, I used Nik Color Efex pro-4 - Darken/Lighten Center, the lightest point of interest over the line of tree trunks.

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Sunflowers at days end

They say you have to suffer for your Art, and here is a prime example!
Who would have known that sunflower fields had to have many bee hives to pollinate all those flowers, and who would have known to carry a bee sting antidote in the car?
I do now... Ouch! I was stung on the palm of my thankfully left hand, which blew up to twice it's size!
Now I carry a small pot of Bicarb powder in the glove compartment, next to my photo filters!

Here is a square crop with a very simple, yet effective, one texture combo use, later zapped up in Nik color Effex Pro 3.
I simply upped the color brightness, the effect was like turning on a light switch!

Lyme Fossil - Soft Light @ 100%
Nic Color Pro 3 - Color brightness tweak.

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Women under Scaffolding

I'm no stalker, but when I see a great silhouette, and I'm armed with a camera, I will sometimes move just a few tiny paces to try to get a secret shot!

Our narrow medieval streets are perfect for this type of shot, though for the same reason our streets are often too shaded and thus too dark, and don't even get me started on my pet hate, parked cars! Here I used the trusty Lensbaby once more, lens wide open, at F1; no aperture. It was around 5pm, before the sun wasn't too low but also not directly overhead.

As we've been asked, Ive tried to recreate how I processed, step by step, and why I chose the textures used.

To the base image, to add more definition, I first slightly cross processed it and used a slight vignette darkening the edges. You can do this simply with free photoshop actions

To start with texturing I wanted to add more light. For my recent lensbaby shots I like to use the new Opal texture, here I used it twice, then I wanted to add a more beefy texture and darken the sky, I chose Tempest Sea, flipped vertically.
I loved the painterly/scratchy effect on the blue scaffolding covers brought by this texture, but found the overall blue a little too bright/fruity. So another favorite texture was pulled out, Newt to help tone down, which was okay but still not quite there, so I clicked it off. Finally I tried Swans Way for the first time, as I liked the look of that billowing canvas like movement this texture suggests, and Wow, happy days! It toned down the blue perfectly and pulled it all together and added a dramatic cracked grunge!

It was almost finished but decided there was now just a bit too much street clutter which the textures had highlighted.
So I clone tooled out a red road sign on the right, and a pale board on the left under the scaffolding, both clearly visible on the raw base image.

Opal - Overlay @ 74 % softly brushed from bottom edge and tot of sky
Opal - Overlay @ 100 % softly brushed from bottom edge and all of sky and right building
Tempest Sea - Overlay @ 45% Flipped vertically
Swans Way - Soft Light @ 100%

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Complete Flypaper Package

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

Combo Pack Offer

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Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

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The miracle of positive thought

Its always a pleasure to share our published images.
This book came out a few days ago, shot last summer, we've already shared the recipe, but here we've brought the two together!
Translation: Where there is a will there is a way!
The miracle of positive thought.

This was shot a few mins after sunrise over a green wheat field and a vineyard on the horizon. The camera was very low, almost in the wheat, and I shot on automatic in raw mode.
Processing was simple, I used just one texture,
Muscatel, desaturated, Hard Light @ 100%
And a base copy which was altered in curves, changing the saturation to more of a purple tone. This final top layer was Normal @ 44%

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lone tree on Christmas day

Another picture from the same Christmas day sunset shoot as the previously blogged snowman. I knelt down in the snow for this shot, and used the same Cokin mild ND2 graduated filter as before. Processing was simple, and with the addition of a slight clone-over, removed the distracting buildings behind the tree.

Base copy slight HDR enhancement in CS5 - Multiply @ 15%
Base copy slight HDR enhancement in CS5 - Soft Light @ 23% over snow only - sky brushed away.
Dawn Grunge - Soft Light @ 100%
Matmos Lake - Soft Light @ 100% Flipped vertically and horizontally, smoothed. Colour changed to a 'Lime green' with colour sliders.

See it bigger 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

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