Beach Sunrise

Photos taken yesterday morning watching the sunrise at Bribie Island.

Beautiful shades of peach and grey/blue.

Watercolour Painting with Paintshop Pro

For those who commented on my "painting" in the forum earlier this week, I have put together the steps I took to achieve the effect. It uses a combination of techniques from Photoshop tutorials adapted for PSP.

 Here is the original image that I was working from. I took this photo in Rajasthan, India in 2006.

Method

1. 1.       Duplicate your image and blur. (Adjust/Blur/Gaussian Blur of radius 3)
   2.       Duplicate this layer and apply Artistic Effect/ Glowing Edges. (I used default 3.20)
   3.       Invert this layer. (Image/Negative Image)
   4.       Convert glowing lines to greyscale and desaturate to approximately 40%.
   5.       Duplicate the layer from step 1 and drag this layer to the top. Invert this layer (as in 3) and set the blending mode to Dodge. The image will be mostly white and this will be the base to paint (i.e. reveal the image with colour below).
   6.       Now comes the fun part. Using a variety of brushes with colour set to black and opacity at no more than 40% you start painting the brush strokes. As you are working on a dodge layer, the effect of this will be to reveal the underlying colours of the photo. Use a variety of brushes (I used dry brush and van gogh). You can build up colour by going over areas more than once. It is better to work with larger brush strokes and move down to smaller to fill in detail.
   7.       Lastly you can merge the layers and add a subtle texture effect eg. Canvas fine.
   
   
   Vary the parameters to achieve different effects. 
   Here is another one that took just 5 minutes. Al Hajjar in Yemen.
   
   
   
   
   

Playing with Textures

Jerry of  Shadowhouse Creations provided 2 raised effect textures on his blog and I could not resist playing with them. I love adding texture to photos! This is the result. The photo was taken many years ago when travelling in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. I remember stopping late afternoon for a meal in a local inn. This is the first time that a foreigner had ever stopped to eat there. We had a plate of mutton and rice. It was good! The tea was served, as is typical in this area,  green with cardomon and cinnamon. This area is the most beautiful on earth. Three mountain ranges collide to provide scenery that takes your breath away.

Click on photo for texture detail and credits.
To achieve this effect I used the first texture with following layers:

1. Lightened texture and placed as Overlay 100%.
2. Original texture Colour Burn 31%
3. Original Photo

Jerry has a great collection of free textures available. They are definitely worth checking out.