Barely There

I took this one at my parents house last weekend, the wall in their conservatory is a lovely blue colour and makes a great backdrop.
As well as a recipe today, I'm going to try and explain how I change the colour of textures or de-saturate them in photoshop by using a Clipping Mask, the big advantage of doing it this way as you can easily go back later and change things.

I started off by duplicating the background.
Hue Saturation layer to de-saturate the image slightly
Dark blue colour layer @ exclusion 29% with some of the colour removed from the focus flower
yellow/green colour layer @ screen 22%
Cholorophyl Texture @ Overlay 100%
and the photo looked like this:

Which was too green for my tastes so I decided to de-saturate the texture.
Press the alt key and at the same time click on the adjustment layers button at the bottom of your layers palette and select a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Release the alt key.
A box will open

 

Check the "use Previous layer as a clipping mask" box and press okay.

Your layers palette will now look like this with the  hue saturation layer attached to the texture layer.

 

And by adjusting the sliders in the hue/saturation adjustment box you can tweak the colour to taste. In my case the settings were Hue -16, saturation -100 and lightness -16. As I said before, the advantage of this method is you can go back and tweak things very easily and turn off the adjustment layer too if so desired. 

Next I added:

Apple Blush (pack 1) @ soft light 100% this was desaturated a little using the above method, I also removed some of the texture from the focus flower.

Grosgrain (Pack 1) @ Screen 27 % with some of the texture removed as above.

I finished with a  curves layer to give the colour a final tweak.

Of course you can use any of the adjustment layers as a clipping mask, it's a great tool!

Hope you've followed all that, feel free to ask questions and I'll do my best to answer.

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morning mist

I was emailed a few weeks ago, asking how to create a mist effect
with textures. My tardy answer is now shown here (sorry Bob!)
This image was captured on the mountains last January.
I'd not used these particular images because although I shot them in raw, It still had blown out areas.
However, with our new textures it came to me just last night, a bit of a revelation! - Don't bother hiding the blow-outs, simply lighten and texture the rest of the image! :-)
Necropolis is still my all time personal favorite texture, but these days I tend to use a tweaked version. Just the other day, you might recall,
I used a dark green version?
You can create your own easily by following this tip:
With the aid of the Colour sliders at the top in photoshop I turned this texture to a dark indigo colour with the slider pushed all the way to the right. I then save and use like a new texture, the beauty of this new texture are - no warm/brown tones!
How to:
Top of Photoshop - Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation -
Hue @ +180
Saturation @-28
Lightness @ -23
Save this Texture and name it 'Necropolis Indigo' for future tutorials!
Here's my texture recipe
Necropolis (turned into an indigo blue as discussed) Opacity - Soft Light @ 89%
Necropolis (indigo blue), used on blown out highlights at the top only) Opacity - Color Burn @ 8%
Apple Blush - Opacity - Overlay @ 68%

At this point something wasn't quite right, the sky colour didn't really blend with the picture. So I flattened all my layers and started with a second onslaught of texture! This time from Tex Box Two.
If you look at the base image you'll see the bottom of the image is very dark with no mist, it wasn't really working.
So I pulled out the 'Leaden Hall' texture - don't ask me why I thought this might work - I was lucky!
I flipped this texture vertically and so the pale part was at the bottom. The Skirt at the top was pulled above the picture top and cut off.
To create the extra fog and pull together, I simply turned this Leaden Hall texture to - Opacity - Screen @ 61%
I blurred it a little and I also changed this layer to B/W and changed the colour to a green/blue with the top sliders.
I then removed the top half of the texture with a very soft eraser brush, used selectively.
Last finishing texture was:

Chlorophyll Opacity - Soft Light @ 57%
Used to just add a slight vignette at the edges.
Further colour tweaks to finish.

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