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.

How to Photograph Falling Magnolia Blossoms

I've always loved drifting petals and petal drifts. A couple of years ago I happened to be in Virginia during cherry blossom time. Not only were the cherry trees gorgeous, but their drifting petals filled the air like falling snow. Seriously. I even tried to capture it on video.

So back home in Indiana this spring when the petals on my beautiful magnolia tree started blanketing the ground, I thought I would try to capture their descent. I guess there are many ways you could approach this ... a close up of a single petal in mid-air, a long exposure that would leave a trail of movement or even a multiple exposure showing the descent of a petal. All challenging shots in their own right (at least for me).

"Steal Like an Artist" by Austin Kleon on a Coffee Table 
  at a 2015 Indianapolis Flower and Patio Show exhibit.

As it turns out, a simple, straight-forward approach was enough of a challenge! It's not easy to capture a petal in flight. But let me digress. Back in March I went with a friend to the Indianapolis Flower and Patio show at the state fairgrounds. While I was admiring a particular landscape display, a little book entitled "Steal Like an Artist" lying a coffee table caught my eye. The landscaper told me that his daughter was an artist and that this was her favorite book. Intrigued, I snapped a photo. When I got home, I ordered this book and another entitled "Show Your Work," both in ebook format and both by the same author Austin Kleon. I enjoyed them both, especially the latter. Some concepts I garnered from Austin are that you need to find a group of like-minded people - or let them find you; that online is the best venue for meeting like-minded people these days; and that to be found online you need to establish a long-lived online presence. Last but not least you need to show your work - only work to Austin is not just the final product - but also the process. He says we should be active everyday and share bits and pieces of things we are working on ... So I'm going to share a few lessons learned from some 200 attempts to capture petals in flight. I know, kinda lame, but it is one of the things I've been trying to learn how to do in my photography.

If you're going for stop-action on moving objects, then you need high shutter-speed (burst shooting capability is also nice). So any setting that gives you the highest viable shutter speed (whether you choose a wide-aperture or work in shutter-speed priority) is good. Also, for high shutter-speed you'll need good light - so early to mid-afternoon with its usually problematic high contrast is not necessarily a bad time of day in this case.

Multiple vantage points work, but I found in looking at some of my 200 photos, that petals show up best either silhouetted against the sky or against something light - or if the petals themselves are gleaming in the sunlight, against something darker. In the wide-open Indiana prairies, petals do not fill the air like drifting snow (unlike Virginia). So wait for a breeze gust or better yet a steady wind.  Aim and focus toward the direction the wind is blowing the petals to have a better chance of catching them. Focusing or metering on the trunk of the tree provided me a fairly nice medium gray tone and adequate depth of field. (I should also mention that the sun was at my back, in the west - and I forget whether I set the camera to spot-meter or to center-weight meter.) Also if you can, position yourself where you can see the top of the tree. Wait to see several blossoms start to descend - and press and hold that button! If you're lucky you'll catch 'em in mid-air. My frustration was that my camera only did three bursts and then lagged in recording them, thereby limiting my ability to keep shooting. Probably using a tripod and remote control would be good - but I need to brush up on those skills. I set the camera to ISO 100 which gives sharp, beautiful detail (but higher ISO's will allow you to work at higher shutter speeds). I think in my best shot I forgot I had set the focus to macro or macro zoom - and that actually lent a nice little exaggeration to the photo. (Or maybe that's just my imagination.) In post-processing, perhaps adding a motion filter to the photo would also help emphasize falling or drifting petals.

Falling and drifting magnolia blossoms - best viewed full screen

Falling and drifting magnolia blossoms - zoomed in

My final thought on this topic, is that this shot was a lot of work for relatively little return (capturing about seven little petals in flight), and is probably more easily and successfully attempted in Virginia during cherry blossom time. ;)

In the meantime, happy shutter-bugging!

JuneBug

May and June

In May and June when the flowers bloom,
and the air is filled with a sweet perfume,
and the petals blow like the drifting snow,
then the neighbors forget their winter woe
and greet one another on a sunset stroll.

from poems.html

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.

How to Bring Out the Story in your Casual Photos with Photoshop Filters

I've been wanting to attempt an article for the scrap-booker or casual photographer (folks like me, in other words) to share how I get the most story-telling "bang" out of my casual photos. If, on your quest toward becoming the expert photographer who always takes the perfect picture, you're like me and can't afford really high-end camera equipment with larger sensors, or if you just don't quite have the on-the-spot photography skills to meet the demands of every memorable moment you encounter, you may end up with a lot of bad, so-so average, and merely "okay" photos. (I'm not saying, by the way, that becoming a better photographer is a bad ambition). In fact sometimes even your really good photos may not quite reflect the image you stored in your mind's eye when you pressed that camera button; and if you're like me, you're always seeking ways to make your photos look even better. But good, bad, or ugly, the photos you've already taken are your reminders of the memorable events or scenes of beauty from your life. They're too good to throw away, yet somehow they remain pale, distant cousins of the actual experience - and you desperately want to breathe life back into them. So what I want to discuss in this article are ways I've found in Photoshop CS5 to change my so-so images into the image I hoped I would get when I pressed the button on the camera. These techniques may also apply to Photoshop Elements and Light Room.

Woodcuts, oils, and water colors

Continuing on from my previous post about my computer graphics class this fall, following are some Photoshop Cookbook effects that make photos look like oil paintings, water colors, and woodcuts. You can click the thumbnails to get the full-size image - in many cases doing that will help you distinguish the effect from the original photo more clearly. In some cases I tried different effects with the same photo.

Water Color Effect	Original
	Original
	Original

Following are oil effects:

Oil Effect	Original
	Original
	Original

The following effect converts a photo to a woodcut (remember doing those in art class?)

Woodcut Effect	Original

In many cases these effects aren't necessarily an improvement on the original photo, but they were fun (and sometimes frustrating) to do!

JuneBug

Summer Lights

This picture is as close as I've been able to come to the memories of my childhood when the lightening bugs were out in July.

I'm still learning to take decent pictures of lightening bugs. It's hard. =:O

I took this picture on a very slow setting, the camera propped on the arm of a bench to steady it, no flash,and with the multiple spot meter setting. (Hence the streaks) I then "developed" and enhanced it in Photoshop with the curve, saturation, and artistic tools, to make the little guys show up like they normally would to the naked eye. :)

There just don't seem to be as many lightening bugs in recent years as I recall in my mind's eye ...




Click on the image to see it at higher resolution

Fire FliesCome ride with me 'neath fading skies,

past floating fields of fire flies

Like champagne bubbles, they burst and rise,

and steal the star light from the skies.

Now here, now gone, the summer flies,

and fades to autumn before our eyes

So come ride with me in the pale moonrise,

past floating fields of fire fliesJeanne Winstead Copyright 2001 more of JuneBug's poetry


Happy ShutterBugging!

JuneBug

April Sunshine

Time for another photo post! I picked my first bouquet of daffodils in my new home this week. It was a special treat because I never had much success with daffodils at my previous residence of twenty years. But the former owner of this place sure did, as you can see.

One of my favorite blogs is entitled November Sunshine. Indiana springs are often as cold and sullen as Novembers are gray, but if yellow maple leaves are November Sunshine then surely the yellow daffodil is March and April Sunshine. :)

Nothing really revolutionary here. I applied the Photoshop palette knife filter to this photo. (I often wonder what my late great aunt Firma Philips would think of desktop computers and programs like photoshop. She was an artist and often painted from photographs from a client when she couldn't paint from a live scene.)

Anyway, here it is! Click on the image for a 1024 version if you want something larger, like for your desktop.




Happy Spring Shutterbugging!

JuneBug

Looking toward spring

In our neck of the woods, spirea is one of the earlier blooming bushes of spring. I always look forward to the fragrant grace of spirea's long, cascading white branches. Here is a pic of abundant spirea blooms taken with my Olympus C3030 digital camera.

I wanted to use this photo for computer wall paper, but it didn't possess the sharpness and detail I had hoped for at larger sizes - perhaps due to camera shake or memory limitations or whatever. At any rate, I tried out Photoshop's palette knife effect to make the image look more like a painting. I was pleased with the results. The image seems almost impressionistic in how it relays a moment of light and color on a young spring morning.

Click on image to see full size photo

Happy Spring Shutterbugging!

JuneBug

More Photoshop Artistic Effects

Happy end-of-February, folks! Just a quick post to share a couple more photos with Photoshop Effects applied.

The first - roadside lace - has the underpainting effect applied:

Click image for wallpaper size

Here's the pic without the effect applied:

Click image for wallpaper size

The next pic - summer chickory - has the same underpainting effect applied. I should also mention that I saturated the blues in this pic and also the yellows (and then lightened them) to bring out the flowers before applying the effect. I forgot to mention in my previous photoposts that Photoshop has a "fade effect" option on the edit menu, so that you can lessen whatever effect or adjustment you apply. It's pretty cool.

Click image for wallpaper size

Here's the pic without the effect applied.

Click image for wallpaper size

Some pix just seem to make really good candidates for Photoshop Artistic Effects - maybe try it with one you really like, but you didn't get as sharp or in focus as you would have preferred. What effect you choose depends on the photo's subject and composition. It may lend itself to water color, to pencil, to oils, or something else. You just have to experiment with the various artistic effects to find a good "match." So rather than throw something away, turn it into a more "forgiving" image. I think these effects sometimes capture what I was trying to express more than the original photo.

Happy Shutterbugging!

JuneBug, looking forward to spring

What? 2 Posts the SAME Day? =:o

JuneBug's Job Hunting and Photography Blog

Well, who knew I'd be back so soon, lol! I promise this won't become a habit. But as promised here's another image with the Photoshop filter applied. This one's the front porch of our former home - on such an incredibly beautiful winter morning. I worked and worked at getting this image to show how delectably crunchy, icy white the world was that morning, but somehow the camera wasn't seeing what my mind's eye remembered. If only I were a professional photographer instead of an amateur! Anyway, I applied the Photoshop pencil drawing filter to this photo and was pleased with the results. The sharp pencil lines seem to bring out the crystalline nature of the snow or hoar frost. At least to me.

Again - the photo with the filter applied and then the original with just the sharpening applied:

click on image for larger view

click on image for larger view

This also reminds me of many years ago when I took a serious drawing class in college through the art department. I was in awe of the delicate and exquisite technique that some of the students already seemed to possess.

My husband wonders why I spend so much time at this stuff - I come by it honestly- I have a great aunt, now deceased who was a well known scenery painter in Indiana. Her name is Firma Duchene Phillips. If you ever come across any of her paintings, drop me a note. :)

Happy Photographing!

"Purdue Pink"

JuneBug's Job Hunting and Photography Blog: February 2006

Wait a minute. Isn't that supposed to be Purdue GOLD?

;)

(arghh - where are the message board smilies when you need them) Read on ...

Well, here's my first photo blog. I won't be like some people and publish a photo a day, or even week, lol, but as I find suitable subjects and the time ... :)

Anyway, in the process of updating my photography website Second Looks Photography for spring, I came across this photo which I'd never put on the web mostly because it wasn't sharp. But it does capture so beautifully the colors and form of the subject, a pink dogwood that I photographed a few years ago as I was out walking and enjoying the beauty of the campus. That's the great thing about having a traditional campus like Purdue's. It helps, inspires, and refreshes the intellectual and academic life. :) This shot was taken with my Pentax SLR manual camera and scanned in with my Polaroid negative scanner. Obviously the f-stop is wide open in this shot and the speed is probably relatively low because of the lighting conditions that cold rainy day.

Anyway, I've used Photoshop for some years now to "develop" my pictures. I'm not a graphic designer by training - I don't know design, and I had only beginning instruction in the use of this software. But it seems like every once in a while, I make a leap forward with it and discover new things. (Then I have to go back and incorporate what I've learned into all my old favorites - it's a bottomless pit, lol!)

I tried the artistic filter on this shot - first the water color, and then went with the dry paint brush. I ADORE water color paintings and techniques. Because of the image's overall softness and large blocks of color I thought it might be a suitable candidate. Here's the result:

First the filtered shot, then the original:

click on image for wallpaper size

click on image for wallpaper size

Perhaps another filter effect to come in my next photo blog. Stay tuned. :) Oh yeah, and eventually I will find time, I hope, to complete my profile and favorite links - and design a new template etc.

JuneBug