Photoshop Actions, Overlays, and Textures for under Twenty-five Dollars

I keep seeing all these wonderful online ads about textures and lately, Photoshop Actions and Overlays that you can purchase and apply to your photographs to turn them into works of art. Due to cookies and other forms of internet magic, these ads keep following me around, teasing me and tempting me! The results shown in these ads look absolutely beautiful and the products seem like they'd be fun to learn. Until I see the price tag, that is. These products may or may not make my photos beautiful, but one thing for sure, they can be prohibitively expensive. So I want some certainty before I buy.

Heads up on a Great New Social Sharing Site for Photographers - Introducing YouPic!

Hi, fellow photography afficionados! As per the title of this blog post, I wanted to alert you to a really, Really (REALLY) great new social sharing site for photographers called YouPic!

screen cap of YouPic website

Really!

What's so great about it? Well ... let's see:

• It's free
• It's unlimited
• It's run by photographers from Sweden. (I think.)
• It's sort of a cross between Facebook and YouTube, so everybody gets a home page and a "feed" page
• I get to see dozens of beautiful and inspiring photographs any time of day or night
• and it's gotten my photographs more of a global audience than ANY OTHER SITE EVER, and that includes my own photography site!

What's not to like?

Well, I could go on and on but to give you a better idea of what it's all about, here's what YouPic says about themselves:

• "YOU Inspired: Find high quality inspiration for your photography from millions of photographers."
• "YOU Admired: Showcase your best shots and be rewarded with tremendous exposure, awards, and love."
• "YOU Improved: Improve your photography dramatically with photography tips from peers and by following your progress"

Wow. What could you possibly have to lose? I know what you're thinking. Is it just hype or is all that really true? Well, ever since I uploaded my first photo (after responding to an ad that appeared on Facebook January 1, 2015), I've gotten 12,486 views, have been liked (favorited) 1,088 times, and have been shared (re-pic'd) 571 times. In only two months time! Plus, I've gotten to see, like, and comment on hundreds of fabulous photos in the categories of nature, landscape, black and white photography, street photography, portraiture, fine art photography, etc. from all over the world, in similar fashion as one would view or comment on Facebook entries. I feel like a world traveler without ever leaving home! :) 

Other participants at the site have been so generous and so kind. It helps, I think, that YouPic uses an award system (and a points system) to encourage people to interact. And the more you interact, the more photographers interact with you. Even as a hobbyist I'm not a great photographer, and I certainly don't have expensive or fancy equipment. But on YouPic really great photographers actually take the time to enjoy my photos! What photographer wouldn't like that? 

So, has my photography improved as they claim it will? Well, only time will tell, but I truly believe my photos will improve. For one thing, I can read what people say about their individual process, see what brands and types of cameras they use, and also see what camera settings they use to achieve a particular effect. Besides, I think it just helps to look lots of good photos from fellow enthusiasts - Other people's photos help you see the world in new ways, see things you've never noticed, and perhaps give more thought to how you want to fill your frame before you press the button.

Anyway ... you can tune into your favorite news channel and get all the bad news going on in the world. Or you can join YouPic and see all the beautiful photos coming in from all over the world. The choice is yours, but I think you know which one I'd recommend! Warning, though - just like bad news, beauty can be addictive!

:)

JuneBug

P.S. Here's a link to my YouPic home page. Come on over and have a look! Better yet, come on over and join us! Again, what do you have to lose?  (except possibly some time well-spent?) :)

Experimenting with Turning Photos into Digital Watercolor Paintings

Junebug's watercolor rendition, derived from various methods. See original photo taken in 2003 at the Attica Potawatomi Festival Parade - "Sunshine Queen"

If you google the phrase "how-to turn photo into watercolor tutorial" you'll get about 1,700,000 million results (as of this writing). To date I have only tried out four or five of these (see list below), so this little post by no means represents a comprehensive survey of the literature. ;) But if (like me) you genuinely want to know more about this topic, you have to start somewhere.

I started years ago by simply applying Photoshop's filters to not-so-optimal photos just to play with the software or to experiment with preserving a beautiful memory. But I felt I could do better if I only knew more ...

Introducing My "Scrappy" Photography Site

Greetings!  I am a semi-retired programmer/analyst and instructional designer who loves to dabble in photography and poetry and of late, scrapbooking - both paper-based and digital. For many years my husband Benny had a furniture refinishing business called Second Looks (http://www.secondlooks.biz) and I put up a photography site http://www.photography.secondlooks.biz to complement his business site by offering free wall-paper.

Doctors, Lawyers, and Indian Chiefs

So today it finally occurred to me that since I started this blog around 2006 in part to talk about my interest in scrap-booking and photography, I should introduce my photography site on this blog -sometimes it takes me a while to see the obvious!

But first a little about my photographic journey.

Back to Beginnings

When I first started this blog in 2006, it was with the intent of chronicling my job search, after losing my job of 21 years. I hoped to connect with others in similar circumstances to perhaps find and share encouragement along the way. I also thought it would be fun to share my interests as a hobbyist photographer. Well, as time passed, I found a job, and branched out in other directions. I wrote about my family and the Cafe Rienzi, my great aunt Firma Phillips who was a local scenery artist, and several other other noteworthy personalities and topics. Then last year I lost my job again. So this spring I went back to college through Ivy Tech's Senior Scholar Program which allows people over 60 to take classes for free. Recently I have been blogging about that experience as it ties in with my interest in instructional design.

With this post I'd like to get back to the blog's original intent, my interest in photography. This past semester I had a wonderful opportunity to take a computer graphics class at Ivy Tech. The first half of the semester we worked in Photoshop and the second half we spent on Illustrator. Having played around with Photoshop version 7 for many years, I enjoyed this formal class immensely and thought it would be fun to share some of the products in the next few posts.

Our first series of projects were from the Photoshop Cookbook. I especially enjoyed the out of frame effect as shown in the following series of photos:

Effect	Original

Effect	Original

Effect	Original

More effects to come! Stay tuned ....

JuneBug