Category Archives: Photoshop

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Posted on March 24, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’ve mentioned many times before that I’m fond of making and giving handmade gifts to friends and family on special occasions such as Christmas, birthdays, mother’s day, etc.

The handmade gift does double duty.  One, it’s more personal than something mass produced and store bought, and two, it’s perfect when you’re broke…as most artists are!

My mother’s birthday was last week and I decided to take my usual route and make her gift.  I decided on a piece of digital art.  A photo manipulation.  I scoured my photographic archive for a particular shot I wanted to use and went to town in Photoshop.  I wanted it to look like something out of a fantasy novel (I’m a geek, I know).

And here’s the result.

Fantasy Gate (Teal)

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Until next time…

[^_^]

~A.M.

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Posted in Art, Digital Art, Photography, Photoshop

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Photo Seamstress

Posted on October 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

What happens when you want to make a panoramic image but using a camera’s “panorama” mode won’t help? You take several shots and stitch them together in Photoshop or your image editing software of choice.

 

For example, I wanted to make a panoramic image of my four cats, but getting them all to do what I wanted, at the same time, and hold their poses long enough, was impossible. Therefore, I had to photograph each of them individually and stitch the four images together in Photoshop. This really isn’t as daunting as it may seem. You just have to make sure your in-camera settings (like aperture, shutter speed, and focal length) are the same or as close to the same as possible for each image. Using your camera’s manual setting is the best way to go. Then, you just create a canvas in Photoshop with the same resolution as your original images and enough space (height and width) to accommodate all your images. Copy and paste your original images into this new canvas and make any adjustments necessary to get them to line up. I had to overlap a few edges to get things to work right as well as adjust the levels of an image or two. Once your images are lined up, you can use either the clone stamp tool or the healing brush to get rid of any glaringly obvious seams, crop if needed, and make any adjustments to levels, brightness, and contrast that you want.

 

And voila! You’re a photo seamstress!!

 

Here’s the end result of my project. Four images manually stitched into one panorama.

 

 

Four Cats in a Row

 

Until next time…

 

[^_^]

 

~A.M.

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Posted in Animals, Cats, Photography, Photoshop

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Fun With Photoshop…Round 3…

Posted on June 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

Being stuck inside your house due to bad weather can get real boring, real fast.  Luckily, I have Photoshop to distract me.  Photoshop and a rather extensive archive of photographs to play around with in Photoshop.

While browsing through my archive, I came across a very old photo that I remembered turning into a digital art piece when I first obtained a copy of Photoshop.  I also remembered that quite a while ago, I posted this art piece here on my site in the “Digital Art” portfolio for you, my fine readers, to enjoy.

Now, let’s have a little fun with this, shall we?  The first person that can correctly guess what this started out as (i.e. what the original photograph was), will win.  The prize?  My ever-lasting adoration of your Sherlock Holmes-like skills!  But seriously though, I’ll be awesome and send the winner a signed 4×6 print of this art piece.  [^_^]

Care to try your hand?  Leave a comment!  Let’s see who’s brave enough to take a stab at this.  It’s so simple, it’s tough!

Glass Mandala

Until next time…

[^_^]

~A.M.

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Posted in Art, Digital Art, Photography, Photoshop

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Fun With Photoshop…Round 2

Posted on April 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

Once again, I took a short break from taking photos and delved into the world of photo manipulation in Photoshop.

While going through my archives looking for a specific image a while ago (which I still can‘t locate, sadly), I came across a random photo I took from my front porch of a sunset last year.  I had a brief “What the…?” moment when I looked at the photo, then remembered that I took the image specifically to mess around with in Photoshop.  So I did.  This was the result.  I call it “Fire in the Sky”.  Enjoy!

Fire in the Sky

Until next time…

[^_^]

~A.M.

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Posted in Art, Digital Art, Nature, Photography, Photoshop

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What The…?

Posted on March 25, 2013 | 2 comments

To all you photographers out there, have you ever gone back into your archives a year or two, looked at some of your photos, and wondered something like, “What the hell was I doing?” Or, “What the hell was I going for with this image?”  Yeah.  I think we all have.

It can be fun to look back at your early work.  Not only can you see your progress, but sometimes you find hidden gems!

Recently, during my search for the photo I mentioned last week, I took a little stroll down memory lane.  I uncovered a few decent images from a few years ago, but I also uncovered a few “What the hell?” images!  Images where I had no idea why I chose the subject, no idea why I composed the image the way I did, and no idea why I focused on what I focused on.  For example, this image…

Tree Bark

I sat and stared at this image for a few minutes, wondering to myself why the hell I took it in the first place.  Then, looking at a few more images like it, I remembered.  I had taken a few close up pictures of tree bark over the years with the intention of making Photoshop brushes or textures out of them.  I still have to get around to doing that.  I could use them.

Now kids, the moral of this story is really, “when in doubt, take the picture.”  You may or may not have any plans for it at the time you capture the image, and you might look back on it a year or so later and say “What the hell…?”, but take the picture anyway.  And don’t get rid of it.  You never know when it might come in handy for some other project.

Until next time…

[^_^]

~A.M.

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Posted in Photography, Photoshop

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