Well summer is not over yet and all I want now is for the month of August to last longer than our rainy spring did.
I am back at work now after taking July off to enjoy visitor season here on the Island. So on that note here’s a summer photo that I enjoyed ‘photoshopping’ and playing with.
I always feel a sense of wonder when I discover a little bit of nature that I haven’t come across before and felt positively blessed when this butterfly rested on our tomato plant until I managed to find the time to get back with my camera.
I found that the ‘posterize’ filter (under adjustments) in my Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 program let me play with how strongly the number of colors in a photo are ‘posterized’ or reduced and by using this filter to a smaller degree than its default setting I was able to keep much of the detail in my butterfly while the background ‘posterized’ into flatter areas of color.
It saved me the time it takes to use selection tools to separate the foreground and background. I expect it won’t work exactly the same way for every photo, but it can be a quick way to lose some possibly distracting detail in the background of an image.
I still can’t stop myself from playing endlessly with my photoshop (or Gimp or Helicon filter or whatever other image manipulation program I can get my hands on). Hours dissolve as soon I open my photo files and start to play. There must be another purpose to these programs but for me they can be far more addicting than computer games.
I’m going to put a few of these on canvas soon; some as gel transfers (There are some instructions here. . ) and also take a couple of images to a local printer to have them printed on canvas.
I’ll be posting here more regularly again and a few more changes are on the way with mixedmediashop.com. As well as working with my photography I still plan to paint and explore media of all kinds.
As long as summer is still here though, I think I will have to keep my camera close at hand as the old heart strings will keep pulling me into the garden in the hope that there will be a few more magic moments before the season comes to it’s inevitable end.