Pastels

More lavender, this time with the beautiful pink blooms of New Dawn rose in the background. New Dawn is a particularly vigorous rose which is smothered in soft pink flowers when it's in full bloom.

This leant itself to soft processing so I tried out a new combo of textures this time.
Ordinance Map @ Soft light 68 %
Rainbow Trout @ hard light 63 % (both this layer and the previous one had a tiny amount of texture removed from the focus flowers)
I finished with some colour layers.
Pink @ soft light 23 %
aqua @ overlay 11 %
Lemon @ overlay 24 %
These three colour overlays were selected (after much experimentation) because they complimented my photo, a different photo and I'd probably have used different colours and opacities.

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My favourite things....

Just looking at this photo conjurers up the smell of lavender for me.
I have a huge lavender bush growing beside the path up to our gate, another grown from a cutting I filched from somewhere. It's nice to be able to walk past it an rub your hands over it release the scent, watching out for bees of course :-) The problem is it's a little too big for where it's planted and and when it rains, especially when it's in bloom you tend to get wet walking past it, so I've got a "protection order" on it to prevent other family members from giving it a haircut.

Anyway..the processing.
To start with I cloned out a bit of background I didn't like (you don't see that here though).
To start with I tweaked the tone and contrast using a colour curves layer and a hue and saturation layer.

Then it was texture time and I used
Holmes @ Hard light 44 %
Backdrop @ Hard light 27 % (with a tiny amount of texture removed from over the flowers).
I finished with a dark blue colour in fact 0e2333 at Exclusion 21 % but this didn't make a great deal of difference to finished image.

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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".