Moon tree ~ Bonne année !

From Jill and I we'd like to wish you all a gilded Bonne année!
Its funny how the best shots are never planned!
Yesterday, as it was sunny, I went for a drive in search of fresh images.
Its continually maddening that all the best views are from our motorways and they are impossible to access without doing huge detours!
However, thus armed I left the motorway and snaked my way home via the normal slower side roads, capturing a few views I was after.
I saw this view from a side road I'd been turning the car from,
looking back towards the East the moon had come up over a hill, framed by this scraggly old fruit tree glowing with the sun set golden light!

I used my 75-300m zoom lens, turned the camera portrait wise and took several panning shots of this scene.
Back at home I joined them in my trusty Autopanopro program to make a huge landscape version first.
This image is a later Square crop of only half the image.

Apple Blush - Opacity - soft light @ 43%
Lost Void - Opacity - Overlay @ 33%
Muscatel - - Opacity - Overlay @ 50%
Colosseum Sienna - - Opacity - soft light @ 47%
Necropolis (turned to indigo blue) - Opacity - soft light @ 49%
Caramel Soft - Opacity - soft light @ 39%
I then flattened the layers, doubled the base image and turned the top layer to B/W.
I then made this copy a contrasty sepia, this helped bring out the depth.
B/W sepia copy - Opacity - soft light @ 42 %

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Both texture Packs!

Light

This was taken one warm summer evening earlier this week when we were visiting family in Alexandra. There's a lovely track alongside the Manuherikea River and these daisies and some wild poppies were growing in the gravel on the river bank.

I processed this by using just two textures, one from Tex Box One and one from Tex Box Two
Colosseum Sienna @ Soft Light 100%
Gosgrain @ Screen 62% with a mask added and some of the texture removed from the focus flowers
Then it was just a matter of adding a curves layer where I tweaked the colour curves this gave much of the green tone you see in the final image.

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Both texture Packs!

Geraniums

I've kept this one back a few months because it was a first try-out with the as then unpublished; Lost Void & Lime Plaster textures.
Its just a shot of Geraniums & ivy on our north facing window ledge.
They caught the sunlight glancing off the stone house windows opposite.
I liked the way this texture combination gives a kind of antique glass look. I was pleased with this painterly effect, reminding me of the Paintings of Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmond.

This image uses textures from both Box One and Two.

Lost Void - opacity - Soft light @ 100%
Lost Void - opacity - Overlay @ 46%
Lime plaster - opacity - Overlay @ 46%
Apple blush - opacity - Overlay @ 32%
Necropolis (turned to a dark olive green) - opacity - soft Light @ 100%

Walking the dog

At this time of the year when our evenings are long and it doesn't get dark until around 10pm so we often go for a walk on the beach after dinner.
We weren't alone at the beach this night, as well as the few walkers, runners and dogs there was also a solitary sea-lion basking in the evening sun.
This was taken just before the sun disappeared behind the headland at the south end of the beach.

This was processed fairly simply.
First I duplicated the background and changed the blending mode to Soft light and reduced the opacity to 68%, this had the effect of increasing the contrast a little
The two textures I used were
Muscatel from pack 2 @ Soft Light 65%
Caramel Soft from pack 1 @ overlay 25%

Butterfly Bliss

Just like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers and viewers and wish everybody from both of us - Happy Holidays!:-)
Here's an oldie but a Goldie, taken with a 75-300m zoom lens in the summer at a small lavender farm at Barjac in the Gard area of the south of France.

Processed first by tone mapping in Photomatrix, to enrich then adding:
Phosphorescence - opacity - Soft Light @ 51%
From Pack One of our Flypapers.
I gave the final image a clean up with a slight paint effect
Reprinted here:
"To achieve the painterly effect, I simply use the 'Colour Noise filter'
at a very low setting, then sharpen this with 'Poster Edges' Filter at around 10%.This pulls it together again, I sometimes also use the
'Paint Daubs' filter at a low setting and then Poster Edges".

Christmas Roses

It's Christmas eve here in New Zealand and my Christmas preparations are largely complete thank goodness!! In some ways I envy you northern hemisphere people your winter Christmas celebrations. As well as preparing for Christmas we have to cope with organising summer holidays as most people take their annual leave after Christmas, the end of the school year and the high season in the garden. Tomorrow we intend to have a casual BBQ Christmas dinner with my mothers wonderful whiskey trifle to follow....mmmm!! I love trifle!!

On that note, Paul and I would like to wish all our loyal customers and readers of this blog a very Happy Christmas. and thanks as always for your support, friendship and inspiration.

Anyway back to the photo...this one was processed with several textures from Pack 2 and one from Pack 1
After duplicating the background and cloning out some distractions.
I added a selective colour adjustment, the only colour adjustment I made here was to the neutrals. the settings were Cyan -5, Magenta +10, Yellow -8 and Black +6.
Textures added were
Peach Blush @ Overlay 66%
Peach Blush @ Hardlight 13% masked to remove texture from the key areas.
Ming @ Multiply 56 % this layer had its colour changed with a hue saturation layer so it was warmer.
Archival canvas @Screen 7% masked as before
Archival canvas @ Soft light 100%
Apple Blush @ Overlay 68 %


Happy Holidays (and Texturing) everyone!

fishing trip

On Sunday afternoon just to curb the midwinter 'Cabin fever'
we drove up towards the mountains. The light was clear and the air was crisp, but this time I diverted, hung a left and drove to 'Lake Salagou'.
Normally its a tourist nightmare, being the biggest and most famous lake in our area of the languedoc, but now in midwinter it's almost deserted, and apart from it being a couple of meters lower than it should after our 10 year drought, looked superb!
These guys were having a great time, all over the place, drinking, and not much catching as it was too cold for fish to bite. The sun was setting, catching a slight mist. These light misty scenes are ideal to texture.
The last two overlays are blurred because I liked the color they gave but wanted to keep the bokeh effect soft.

Textures used are from both packs, using the first listed to the last.

Chlorophyll (Blurred) Opacity - Soft Light @ 19%
Muscatel - Opacity - Soft Light @ 25%
Apple Blush - Opacity - Soft Light @ 44%
Pompeii Stucco - Opacity - Soft Light @ 32%
Phosphorescence - Opacity - Overlay @ 48%
Phosphorescence (Blurred) - Opacity - Overlay @ 22%
Phosphorescence (Blurred) - Opacity - Overlay @ 22%

Sorbet

A flower again, this is an astrantia bloom that I picked on one of my walks and brought home to photograph indoors, it being too windy here at the moment for macros outside. The pink you see in the background is the roses in the blue and white jug from one of my previous photos.

The first thing I did was add a selective colour layer, adjusting the "neutrals" -the sliders were at cyan -12, magenta -11, yellow +1 and black -27.
The textures I used were
Rainbow trout @ Soft Light 69%
Pompeii Stucco @ Soft Light 40%
These two added a very subtle textural depth to the photo
I finished with a curves and levels adjustment for minor tweaks to the tone and contrast.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone and stay warm if you're affected by the snow-storms!

ruined windmill story

Our Southern French countryside is dotted with these ancient stone windmill ruins. There must be hundreds but I've seen only a couple that have been restored. The backdrop being our black mountains, which help to protect our Mediterranean coastal plains from the worst excesses of the northern European winter cold.
The field contains freshly planted vines, the soil disturbance having caused these very fragrant ancient winter flowering weeds to thrive once more. They are pink/white and I have no idea what they might be, we always see them in organic winter vineyards, their perfume is intoxicating, reminding me of carnations. In this image I've tried to evoke that rich, heady scent.

I've used textures from both One and Two from the first used to the last.

Lost Void (upside-down) ~ Overly ~ Opacity @ 26%
Caramel cream ~ Overly ~ Opacity @ 61%
Ordinance Map ~ Color Burn ~ Opacity @ 17%
Antique Liaisons ~ Overly ~ Opacity @ 78%
Raw Linen ~ Soft Light ~ Opacity @ 100%
Chlorophyll ~ Overly ~ Opacity @ 17%
Labyrinth ~ Soft Light ~ Opacity @ 68%

Flypaper Iris

Sometimes when you're texturing it's a toss up between the subtle approach or a heavy treatment. With this iris I spent what seemed like hours trying to get the balance right, it looked nice subtle but in my eyes anyway, looks better with the texture more pronounced.

I processed it using a mix of Textures,
3 textures taken from pack Two and 1 texture from Pack One.
First I duplicated the flower layer and used it with Soft Light @ 24%
this darkened it slightly.
Algae @ Soft Light 63%
Rainbow Trout @ Soft Light 39%
Tarte Tatin @ Soft light 38%
Chlorophyll @ Hardlight 95% desaturated a bit to tone down the green

A layer mask was added to each texture layer and some of the texture was removed from the flower.
I finished with a Levels adjustment to tweak the contrast.

light at the end of the block

I'd been meaning to capture the sun set light on this building for ages, over looking our central market hall, this elegant shop/apartment building must have some very strange shaped rooms!
I've not done much to it, the camera had its polarizor filter on, the textures were just used to bring out the golden tones I saw on the building.

As ever, the textures used are from the first listed to the last.
Textures are from both Tex Box One and Two.

Chlorophyll - opacity - soft light 38%
Caramel Cream - opacity - soft light 76%
Necropolis - opacity - soft light 36%
Copy of base image - opacity - soft light 32%

Abundance

Some more roses from my garden, these ones sadly have almost finished flowering and being "old roses" only flower the once each season, but they more than make up for that with the abundance of blossom and wonderful fragrance.
I grew the bush from a cutting I'd appropriated from our local historic cemetery :-)

After my initial square crop and the tidying of a stray petal or two from the bottom I processed this fairly simply with...
Apple Blush from Tex Box 1 @ Soft light 100%
Colosseum Sienna from Tex Box 2 @ Soft Light 100%
I removed a little of the texture from the focus flower using a layer mask.
And tweaked the tone and saturation using curves and hue saturation layers.

Midwinter...

Another photo from a day trip to a wonderfully frosty Central Otago last winter -many of my photos that day were taken out the car window, a shooting technique I'm getting very practised at as my driver gets sick of me asking him to stop.

Anyway in this photo I cropped off some of the base (a fence) and added some sky using the clone tool, you'll probably see my rough cloning in the before version, but it doesn't matter too much as texture is wonderful for covering up these things!

Processed using
Lost Void @ Soft Light 100%
Ming @ Overlay 100% desaturated a little using a hue saturation adjustment
Holmes @ Hard Light 100% this texture too had it's hue and saturation adjusted so it fitted the subject better -mainly toning down the yellow a bit.
and that was it!

m e s s e n g e r

A dull afternoon on the beach found me on my knees trying to get a low level shot. Overcast days are perfect to try moody, grainy textures.
The idea behind this picture was 'a Message in a bottle', but from the bottles perspective!
The Lime Plaster somehow helps give that 'old distorted glass effect' .

Tex Pack Two textures were:
Lime Plaster ~ opacity ~ Overlay @ 27%
Lost Void ~ opacity ~ Overlay @ 100%
Lost Void flipped vertical ~ Opacity ~ Overlay @ 100%
Voyageur Map ~ opacity ~ Soft Light @ 97%
Ming ~ opacity ~ Overlay @ 100%
Ming's colour was changed to a Prussian blue with the Hue/Saturation sliders. The combination of Voyageur Map and Ming used here is a real winning combo!
Finally, as I'm all for an easy life, a new thing I've tried is to first re-size my images to 4000 x 4000 Pixels*.
This is the same size as the Flypaper textures. Thus simply enabling dropping of the same size on top of the base image, saving the laborious 'pushing and pulling' our textures into shape! :-)

*Changing to 4000 x 4000 pixels
Firstly, You need to crop your image square, then go to the top of the page and select Image - image size - width, change the top box to 4000 pixels
And make sure your resolution is 300 pixels/inch. Press save.
Its easy:-)

Nostalgia

Cecille Brunner is such a pretty little rose, I have the bush variety and it's lovely at this time of the year. My mother used to have the climbing version in her old garden, it was a huge bush which scrambled up an old plum tree and was smothered in blossom and seemed to grow new branches overnight, we had roses in the spring and plums in the summer!

Anyway back to the texturing, as Paul says we've been asked how we go about deciding which textures to use, and for me at least it's all a matter of trial and error especially at the moment when I'm still learning how our textures in the new Tex Box 2 behave with photos. I don't usually have a look in mind when I start processing, but just open some likely looking textures and "play", and if I'm lucky, something works :-)

In this one after the initial square crop (I'm a square addict) I went to our new texture pack and decided on:
Archival Canvas @ Soft Light 100% this added a nice subtle texture and I could've left it like that, but I thought I'd see what some other textures looked like.
Backdrop@ Multiply 100% (which added some depth)
Holmes @ SoftLight 100% for some grunge and to add interest with the banding of this texture at top and bottom.
Copy of original image @ SoftLight 63% this added a little more definition
And it was done!

Wall Story

We drove past this windmill many times on the way to the beach,
situated on a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean salt marshes.
Thankfully we managed to stop a few times at sunset on route home to capture it on camera.
I was lucky because it was cut down this year, it was really sad to see the top rotors resting in the vines..
It was beautiful lit up at sunset, I even climbed it once!
Martine pretended she didn't know me, but that's another story!:-)

We've been asked about our thought processes when we use textures.
Firstly, if you get the format or crop of the image sorted I think you're halfway there.
Here I noticed the ground at the same level as the texture's skirt,
a lucky marriage made in heaven. The rest just fell into place...

This recipe uses textures from both sets..
As always its the first listed used to the last.

Leaden Hall - Opacity - hard light @ 94%
Copy of base image - Opacity - Luminosity @ 14%
Lime Plaster - Opacity - Color @ 68%
Copy of base image - Opacity - soft light @ 98%
Copy of base image - Opacity - Color @ 34%
Necropolis - Opacity - soft light @ 65%@

Black Birds ~ Our first guest post !

Lora, who is a semi-professional photographer from Seattle,
wrote to say that she loves our new texture pack and has shared her lovely Black Birds images of before and after and even her recipe!
We hope to showcase more of your donated images and recipes,
just drop us a line! :-)

Lora used Lightroom to crop and did some extra sharpening and exposure adjustment.
All textures used are from the new Tex Box Two!

1st Layer: Algae - overlay @ 88%
2nd Layer: Colosseum Sienna - overlay @ 38%
3rd Layer: Sunflower Sky - overlay @ 73%

Five

Another shot taken on a walk on the lovely Doctors Point Beach just to the north of Dunedin. These same people appear in a similar shot but I processed this one quite differently which shows how a different textures can give the same scene a whole new look. As well as some Flypaper Textures, I used a new one that will be available in a soon to be released pack once we've made up our minds what to include :-)

To start with I duplicated the the base layer, I then blurred that layer using the lens blur and added a layer mask and removed the blur from my subject, the people
The textures I used were
Tarte Tatin @Soft light 45%
Shargreen Bone @Overlay 45% This layer had a mask added to remove the texture from the ground area.
Bruised Saffron @ Overlay 13%
Lamp White Brush @ Soft light 25 % with the texture removed from the ground as before.
Unnamed new Flypaper (available soon!) @ Overlay 77%

Bust and tree

On the same day but taken just before the last 'Reflected Light' posting. This is inside our Beziers Park of the poets, decorated with many stone carved busts. Its made up of two pictures, merged in photoshop, as my Autopanopro was playing up!
A more finished/textured version of this image is on my Flickr site.

As always the textures are from the first used.
Apple Blush - Opacity - Soft Light 43%
Necropolis - Opacity - Soft Light 72%
Caramel soft - Opacity - Hue 54%
Raw Linen - Opacity - overlay 21%
Raw Linen - Opacity - overlay 21%

reflected light

Walking back from our local 'Park of the Poets' in Central Beziers,
I came across this dark and narrow bow terrace.
The lowering sun reflecting off the opposite houses stucco in an interesting way, lighting the upper apartment windows.
You'll see I've removed a mass of visual pollution from the skyline, aerials are the one thing I almost always clone out!
Processing was easy, I just used several textures to build up a good depth of grunge.

Caramel Cream - Overlay - Opacity @ 84%
Dangerous Liaisons - Overlay - Opacity @ 27%
Orient Express - Multiply - Opacity @ 35%
Raw Linen - Soft Light - Opacity @ 100%
Pompeii Stucco - Overlay - Opacity @ 18%

See it on Flickr

Faded Memories

These half dead flowers are the remainder from an earlier photo session but they caught my eye when I was trying out my new 50mm lens. Focusing at f1.4 is very hit and miss I can see even with auto focus :-)
Processed with Flypaper Textures Tarte Tatin @ Soft light 36%
and Pompeii Stucco @ screen 33% (softened slightly with a guassian blur) A layer mask was used to remove some of the texture from the flowers.
Finally I used a curves layer for a final adjustment to the tone.

Have a great weekend everyone! I'm looking forward to some time for some more experimenting with my new toy:-)

See it on Flickr

Flypaper Textures: Cow on the Hill

We visited our "hut" in the country during the weekend, it's situated beside a river in the midst of farmland so we had sheep over one fence, someone making hay in the paddock over the river and over the road there was a large herd of dairy cows.

I processed this lady with Flypaper Textures once again..
First was a layer of Dangerous Liaisons @Soft light 65% this brightened the image a little.
I followed with a layer of Nora Batty @ Overlay 100% this layer was blurred to soften the texture a little
Then I added a layer of my favourite Apple Blush @ Multiply 73%
Finally I tweaked the tone using a curve layer and added a slight vignette using the lighting effects filter (see my previous post for details on how to do this).
And the result...a more painterly cow :-)

The Happy Couple - Flypaper Textured :-)

About a month ago I visited a local beach with my son, intending to take photos of him but when we looked over the sand dunes we were surprised to see this pair of NZ Sea Lions a short distance away. Naturally I rushed back to the car to exchange my short lens for a longer version as these guys don't like you getting too close, they are surprisingly fast movers too and you had to keep an eye on them especially if you got between them and the sea.
This is but one of the many photos I took that afternoon and was processed with Flypaper Textures to add a bit of depth and a vignette

The Flypaper Texture I used was Caramel Soft, as well as adding texture it gives a slight vignette effect. I used it at Soft Light 100% This layer was blurred an desaturated.
As well as the texture I used a vintage film effect (a combination of curves, colour layers etc) to mute the colours.
Once I was happy with the effect I used the stamp visible command on a PC it's Ctrl -Alt -Shift -E duplicated that layer and changed it to a Smart object from the drop down filter menu, this wonderful feature which was introduced in PS CS3 lets you go back and edit your filter settings.
Then I used Render lighting from the Filter menu to add more of a vignette. From the render lighting dialogue I selected a 2'oclock spotlight and omni and then tweaked the settings, this can take a while as there are lots of controls to play with, as well as intensity you can also change the colour of the light and the size etc.
See the following screenshot for more details.

I reduced the opacitiy of the lighting layer to about 50% After a final curves layer to adjust the contrast I called it done!

red box

Back in early July we made a special trip to the beach at sunset just to photograph the full moon rising over the Mediterranean.
The light was superbly opalescent, and I was lucky, as I captured several nice images as well as the later moonrise.

This is one, a huge red container, not sure why it was there or what it contained, but being this amazing rust,
the final rays of the sun turned it into a stunning bright red.

The base image has already been brightened, I only needed a texture to beef up the tones and give a slight vignette effect.
I chose just one, Caramel Cream - soft light Opacity - @ 45%
This was given the full 'Gaussian blur' treatment for a really smooth finish.
I gave the final image a clean up with a slight paint effect, and removed a group of people on the left with the clone tool.
If you look on my Redbubble thread, you'll see another more painterly version.