Dream Beach

This is a view towards the wonderful white limestone cliffs at the end  of  Napenape beach near Cheviot in Canterbury. When we were there it was all but deserted, apart from a woman surf-casting and a small cluster of caravans used by fishermen there wasn't a soul in site.   The beach is made up of small loose pebbles interspersed with larger limestone rocks and we certainly got a workout on our walk -it was one of those two steps forward, one backwards type of beaches :-)

This was processed relatively easily and I used another texture which strangely I have rarely used (though I've seen lots of other people using it to good effect)  namely Sunflower skies. I tend to get in a bit of a rut with textures and use the same ones over and over. I'll definitely be using this combo again though, when I find the right photo.

Sunflower skies @ Overlay 54%
Antique Liasons @ Overlay 100 % blurred with a 4.4 Gaussian blur
Cream colour fill layer @ Soft light 46%
Soft Green colour fill layer @ hue 14 %
Then to tweak the tone I used a curves, levels, and finally a selective colour layer.

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Both texture Packs!

The Road

This was taken while I was on holiday just last week on a very hot and dry North Canterbury day as we ventured high into the hills looking for a river. It's beautiful countryside with rolling brown hills, the occasional tree and white roads thanks to the local limestone. The river, when we found it was a wonderful blue but it was so hot down there in the sheltered and almost treeless valley that we didn't linger.

I had a lovely and relaxing holiday, the weather was perfect and I saw lots of new places, it's good to be back though :-)

After doing some rough cloning in of the sky to make my photo square, I processed this as follows using textures from both packs.
Peach Blush @ Colour Burn 23%
Leaden Hall @ Saturation 51% and removed a little from the sky (a strange choice of blending mode for this texture but it muted the colours subtly)
Necropolis @ Overlay 53% (desaturated a little)
Copy of background @ Overlay 20%
Pompeii Stucco @ Overlay 75% (this gave the vignette)
Muscatel @ Multiply 72 % desaturated and with the texture removed from the upper portions of the image using a graduated layer mask
Peach Blush @ Overlay 44% desaturated a little

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Both texture Packs!