Roman bridge into mist

Welcome to the Autumn seasons textured images! Here's another from my misty morning set, our local ancient Roman bridge into our little old Beziers! Of our several crossings Its my favorite bridge, its both narrow and winding and takes just one lane of light traffic.
Its also historic as its the bridge that the medieval army of crusaders crossed to slaughter most of the Cities inhabitants kicking off the start of the bloody Albigensian Crusade, all of which was chronicled in Kate Mosse's recent blockbuster mystery novel, Labyrinth which was recently filmed in our area for a big UK based studio TV mini series, due out next year!

The image was shot in portrait format, the excess sky being cropped off the top, which might be very useful negative space if used as say, a book cover for Getty, but for its pure drama, I felt this was the right crop.

There are two post processed versions, this is the final darker one, the other is much paler and more ethereal but also stands on its own.
In this new rectangular Autumnal set we used many French names to enhance its seasonal perfumed motif, here I used just two, Quelques Fleurs - meaning, some flowers. And Contre Jour, meaning fittingly, against the light!

Quelques Fleurs - Soft Light @ 45%

Contre Jour - Overlay @ 100%

I then flattened the image and was happy with it, but decided to push the processing by doubling up the image and used Multiply to beef up the image and bring out the blue tones in the sky.

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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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my own private little vineyard

Sunday morning was misty with freezing fog.
Thus not to miss a perfect texturing opportunity, I drove out of town to get some bleak countryside pics. This cute little scene was glimpsed from the car, and so I did a fast 'u' turn to get back to it!
The other pictures had the Cabana or Mazet with the vines leading up to it, this was the wild card, as is often the case, spotted as I left the scene. The recipe is correct, I always save the layers in their own job files. Thus I could, if I wished, just open up an old picture, and just click and drag the old textures across onto new pictures, it can save loads of time! Both Jill and I sometimes do this! :-)
Finishing touches were cloning out litter on the left and softening the top of the tree before adding the final Mulberry Silk texture, this pulled it all together. Some colour softening was also done with the colour sliders, to warm the tones.
I wonder if anyone else see's the similar cracked face in this image as seen in - 'My Own Private Idaho' Movie?:-)

Leadenhall - Linear Burn @ 20% - over sky only, rest brushed away. Flipped vertically and skirt pulled above image and cropped off.
Necropolis - Soft Light @ 100% slightly desaturated.
Pompiii Stucco - Soft Light @ 100%
Apple Blush - Soft Light @ 67%
Leadenhall - Color Burn @ 20% over sky only, rest brushed away.Flipped vertically and skirt pulled above image and cropped off.
Antique Liaisons - Luminosity @ 11%, Flipped vertically.
Mulberry Silk - soft light @ 100%

See it bigger on Flickr

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Chalk path into mist

Here's another example of why we should always carry our camera on airport runs! I drove through thick fog banks from melting snow on the way to Gatwick airport in England over Christmas, being on the motorway it was impossible to stop, so I changed my route home to the minor country roads to capture some serous fog!
This was taken at a beauty spot, a big picnic area, that normally has a superb view of the surrounding chalk hills, you can see the white chalk path in this image, in fact the chalk is always just a few inches under all the grasslands in this protected area of the Surrey Downs.
Shot with a soft grad Cokin filter.

Continuing the conversation about texturing improving images rather than rescuing bad ones' here's an example, the base was ok, but needed some re-balancing.
Textures were used all over then gently brushed away at the darker sides, to try and even things up. A final colour tweak at the end with a flattened version helped pull all the colours together and cool the overall look.

The final result has, I've been told, the timeless quality I was looking for, possibly for a Romance period bookcover? Just a few days after publishing, Getty Images snapped this up as a rights managed image, so I guess they thought so too! :-)

Aquarius - Overlay @ 100% Bottom left hand corner brushed away
Europium - Soft Light @ 100 % all 4 corners softly brushed away
Rose Blush - Overlay @ 100% Bottom left and top right brushed away
Elysium - Hue @ 50% Blurred with Gaussian Blur

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fog after snow

Happy New Year to everyone!
A big thanks to Jill for taking care of things whilst I was mostly off-line in the country;-) I'm just back from Surrey in England, where I've seen more snow than I have for years! Those pics are yet to come, but first an old favorite of mine, trees in fog. Very simply processed using only Matmos lake flipped upside down and used twice. The version shown is a square crop, just for flypapers!

Base duplicated, slight enhancement with HDR CS5 - Lighten @ 40%
Matmos Lake, flipped vertically with color saturation changed to a green/blue tone, blurred with Gaussian blur 80% - Soft Light 88%
Matmos Lake flipped vertically with color saturation changed to a green/blue tone Color @ 48%
See the finished version on Flickr

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Misty morning

This image was done for a texturing challenge over on Flickr, the starting image was kindly  provided by flickr member  Adrigu . Misty landscapes are always great to texture so I jumped at the chance to do this and thought I'd share my recipe here.

To start with I cropped the original rectangle square and roughly added some extra sky.
Serafina Sky @ Soft Light 100%
Concorde @ Overlay 100%
Copy of background @ Overlay 46%
Iridescent Brush @ Subtract  52% (subtract is a new blending mode that appeared in CS5, if you don't have CS5 you're going to have to experiment with some of the other modes)
Then I added the birds.
Brown blurred texture from seriykotik1970 @ overlay 83% this added warmth but didn't do all that much texturally. A warm colour blending mode would probably have achieved the same effect.
At this stage my photo looked like this

It was okay but needed a bit of "life" so I lightly used the fake HDR adjustment (in CS5), this brightened things and especially accentuated the painterly sky textures.  A careful curves adjustment may have achieved something similar.
Iridescent brush and Serafina Sky are from the Painterly pack, Concorde is from Tex Box 2.
See it bigger 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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Three routes into mist

Another misty 'Canal du Midi' shot, just west of Beziers,
our famous local French Atlantic coast to the French Mediterranean sea connection. One of the main reasons for its being built was to avoid having to sail around Spain.
Because just over two hundred years ago those pesky Spanish Pirates were quite a problem!
This in turn brought wealth to the wine producers in this area,
further unimagined riches came with the railways, over a hundred years later.
But that's another story..

The beautiful mile upon mile of huge poplar trees were planted to give the pulling horses and barge drivers some shade and help stop the canal water from overheating and thus turning stagnant in our hot summers.
Hope you're taking notes as there will be a test later! :-)

First of all, try the Curves option to bring out more light.
This picture is made from 4 images joined together in 'Autopanopro'
As always, I list from the base texture up.
Apple blush - Opacity - soft light @ 18%
Raw Linen - Opacity - Hard Light @ 29%
Caramel Soft - Opacity - Soft Light @ 100%
Caramel Soft - Opacity - Overlay @ 17%