2BD33 An Earthy Still x2

I'm slowly getting back into the habit of doing the Beyond Beyond Lessons every week (now that I'm 10 weeks behind again).    This week, she shared the wonderful work of Anatoly Che.  

This lesson is informed and inspired by his work.

 Here's the original image that I started with.  An old book, a blossom from the Korean spice bush last spring, sitting on the old treadle sewing machine.  Lot's of rich texture and saturated colors. 

So the first thing we did was de-saturate with Kim's new Dark Day Preset.

I would love to show you this step, but I'm still so bad with LightRoom 5 that I tend to lose the snapshots. Gone. History tab is empty. All I have is the final finished pic.

Oh wait--I can start over with the original and apply the preset, and export.

This looks pretty good right here.

I did try to recreate this effect in PSE with Kim's directions, but it just didn't come out as nice and light, so I went back to the LightRoom Preset version.  

The Recipe (simplified from Kim's version):

In LightRoom 5 : Background image with Kim Klassen's Dark Day Preset applied

In PhotoShop Elements :

     Background Image

     Copy Background Image - Screen Blend Mode at 21% opacity (This was easier for me to do than Kim's spotlight effect.)

     Color Fill Frame (black from image) - Multiply at 74%

     Kim Klassen's Waterfront 21 Texture - Multiply 80% - masked over flowers and girl

I did play with other textures wanting to bring back some pink to the girl's face and the flowers, but that always brought back green to the book, which I wanted to downplay.  I also played with hue sat settings, but eventually abandoned all that, and just went back to the simple settings you see above.  If anyone can tell me a good way to bring back some pink, I might try it again ...  There must be something with the color target tool, or something ...

Later edit : Here it is : This one is a little pinker.  Kim says her presets are designed for photos shot in RAW, that they may be a bit much on jpgs.  So for this one, I upped the saturation a bit to bring back just a touch of the pink.  It's a little warmer that the other versions above. 

Here's the first one I did with a still life from our last trip to France.

Saucisson in the mountains.

 Here's the original.

The Recipe (A departure from what Kim showed us): 

In LightRoom5 : 

     Auto-toned.  [This actually worked this time. Usually LR5 overdoes it.]

     Kim Klassen's Dark Day Preset to desaturate.

In PhotoShop Elements:

     Background image with LR% edits

     Kim Klassen's Waterfront 2 Texture - Multiply Blend Mode at 16% opacity

     Kim Klassen's Pumpkin Grunge - Soft Light at 87% opacity

     Color Fill Layer Frame

I added the pumpkin grunge because this image needed some color returned.  The Saucisson just did not look appetizing in gray/yellow.  This made it more of a sepia tone.  

2B Day 8 Part 2 : Matte Finishes and PSE Layout

This part of the lesson focused on an easy way to set up a layout in PhotoShop Elements using the Photo Prints > Contact Sheet option.  So quick and easy! It puts each picture on it's own layer.   I will definitely be using this technique again the future.    Please note : The images in the above layout did not get any of the Matte Effect treatments--yet.

After the layout was created, I added a few textures and the text to tie it all together.  The subjects are a series of steam engines in Fairbanks, Alaska.    I love rust!

So here are the Matte Finish experiments with another contacts sheet layout in PSE.  So easy!  The underlying background is Kim Klassen's Naturally Texture. 

I took one of the rust and steam pics from above.  The original picture needed some deaturating to tone down that green grass.  I also wanted to bring out the rusty colors.  When I was working on the initial desaturation, the image took on a mind of it's own resulting in My Matte.   Although I didn't think I had a matte finish by the end, I liked what I saw, so I saved it.  Then I took a new copy of the desaturated image and tried Kim's Matte Effect recipe in PSE.  Same for Light Room.  I added some textures to all 3 as the sky needed some texture.  In the end, I am amazed at how similar all three of them are.

 

Processing Step-by-Step for "My Matte":

Layer 1) Steam Shovel Background Layer
Desaturate :
     Layer 2) Background Copy
     Layer 3) Levels Adjustment - Screen Blend 28%
     Layer 4) Gadient Map > BW > Normal  72%
     Layer 5) Color Fill (Rusty Orange) - Soft Light  70%
Layer 6) Levels Adjustment > Pull in blacks
Layer 7) Texture - 2 Lil Owls Artist Collection 1(2) - Soft Light 69%
Layer 8) Add Text - Viner Hand ITC - Layer Style Rain - Layer Style Sun-faded - Normal 90%
Layer 9) Kim Klassen's Naturally Texture - Multiply 74%

 

Processing Step-by-Step for Matte Effect

1) Background Copy (Desaturated)

2) Levels Adjustment : Pull darks and lights in a bit

    Enhance > Adjust Color > Color Variation : Decrease highlights and shadows in blues and greens

3) Text : Viner Hand ITC

4) Kim Klassen's Naturally Texture at Multiply 68%

5) Copy Layer 4 - Soft Light 21%

6) Kim Klassen's Pumpkin Grunge - Soft Light 26%

Prosessing Step-by-Step :
1) Background Image (desaturated)
2) In LightRoom : Tone Curve : Upped the Shadows / Downed the Lights
                              Split Toning : 30/12    45/8
3) Pulled into PSE to add texture and text

Whew!  That took way longer than I thought it would.  I learned a lot, though.  It's a lot easier to rumble around in PhotoShop Elements these days.  And Light Room is getting easier, too.   Time to do something else, though--like mow lawn.  Cheers!

2B Day 5 : Hunting for the Right Light

This week's Beyond Beyond lesson had me searching the house for light ...  From the get-go, I was starting to over-think this assignment.  I'd have to make some kind of spreadsheet to chart not only which window in the house, but also the time of day, time of year, weather conditions ... on and on ...  I finally decided that was silly.  Yes, I COULD chart all that, but what would I do with that data?  If I really wanted to re-create a certain light effect, I'd have to wait for the perfect conditions to come around again?  Nah!  Keep it Simple!  This exercise is just to make us stretch a little and perhaps find a new staging area that we hadn't discovered previously at home.  This is all about doing the best you can with the light you have.  There were some surprises : The 2 places I tend to stage still-lifes did not work at all this time of day. They were both too flooded with light.  But these other sites that I'd never considered before worked very well.  I have a whole new world of possibilities for staging areas at home.

Above, you see a collage made from the 9 sites in our house that I tested for this exercise at 2 pm on a Saturday afternoon (having purchased the little bird nest at Hobby Lobby earlier in the day).   It was overcast at the time.  These are all straight-out-of-my camera.   The nest is not real, nor are the eggs, but I was inspired by seeing a broken blue robin's egg on the dog walk yesterday.  Let's hope it broke out of its shell of its own accord and wasn't lunch for some other hungry bird.

In this collage, you can see some of the many ways to ADD light to an image if it needs a little help.
1.  The original - in a North Window
2.  Kim's Let There Be Light Light Room Preset - Perfect light with 1 click!
3.  Sybil Trick - Used Kim's Texture Sybil with her recommended recipe
4.  Added a Radial Gradient in PhotoShop Elements
5. Added a Linear gradient in PSE for Kim's "Blanket of Dreamy Light"
6.  LightRoom Adjustment Brush to add a Radial Light by hand

The original image for this exercise was a little darker than most of what I shot for this set.  It needed a little help and seemed well-suited to all the treatments above.  Other images in the North window came out a little better when I bounced light back in with a white board. 

There was so much in this lesson, it could have lasted the whole month.  I wrote about 12 pages of notes for this lesson alone.  Jam-packed!  I can't believe what a bargain this year-long class is!  I did take careful notes, and I will revisit this lesson for future reference.  Previously, if a picture needed more light, I would use the I'm Feeling Lucky in Picasa, or pull it into RadLab.  Ironically, I tried RadLab on this image, and none of the stylets sang to me for this particular image.  Now I have 5 new tools to add Light!

Credit goes to Anja Rabius, another 2B classmate.  I really liked the way she presented this lesson on her blog, so I followed her model.   As for the subject matter, I was inspired by the nest with jelly beans on Sarah's blog.  She also found some beautiful and unexpected light through this exercise. Thank you, Ladies.  You are both an inspiration to me.

All week, George Harrison's "Give me light" lyric has been running through my head.  Thus, I had to include the video for it.   He was my favorite Beatle.  Enjoy!

Give me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) - George Harrison
[Sorry--Blogger is not letting me embed the videos anymore, so you'll just have to follow the link if you want to hear it. Cheers!]

Beyond Beyond Day 3 : Varied Focal Points

Plodding along with Beyond Beyond Lessons ...  I decided I needed to do the lessons in order because they build on each other.   This one looked at varied focus within a shot and then creating a presentation layout.  For this exercise, I used the portrait setting on my Olympus C770 camera.  It's supposed to give you an in-focus subject with a blurred background.   Though I could have also used the Manual Mode with the Canon S90, it needed a battery recharge when I was ready to shoot, after waiting days for the right light--Sheesh!  I even had cue cards written up about how to use the manual focus, and then I find out the battery is dead at the appropriate time.  Good to have a backup!

 

Here's the print layout in Light Room.  The actual layout was pretty simple to do, with Kim's instructions.  I ran into problems when it came time to print to .jpg.   I had missed the setting in the Print Module for this cue, and was only getting prompts to print to a real printer.    (The joys of learning a new program.)  I had to re-watch the video to sort out what I missed.  One little click, and then it all worked.  I was able to pull it into PSE (There must be an easier way-my method was pretty clumsy.)  where I added the text (Journal Font).  I experimented with adding textures to this one, but it didn't seem to need it ...

It might seem like I haven't been doing anything the last 2 weeks, but let me tell ya : There's been a lot of "getting ready" for this class.   Kim talks about how wonderful Light Room is.  So far, I have been reluctant to spend $149 on LR--but I'm warming up to the idea.  I've been using Picasa to organize my pics and do basic edits.  So far, that's been fine.  But I'm starting to realize that Picasa tends to save .psd files as jpg if you save changes to an entire folder.  Ka-Boom! Then I've lost access to the layers I worked so hard to develop.  Doh!   So I'm warming up to the idea of Light Room.  Fortunately, Adobe is currently offering the free beta version of Light Room 5.  So I downloaded that as a kind of free trial.   But that also required an upgrade to my operating system.  One thing leads to another ...   More Delays.  But now things finally seem to be ready to go full-steam ahead.