three girls running

Firstly, Jill and I would like to say a big Hi to the fans of the DPS site!
It was a pleasure to answer questions for Mary Andrade's feature on -
'Tips for Texturing Photographs' over on the DPS site.
For all newcomers to to Flypaper, simply mouse-over the images for a fast before/after effect!

Just back from England where I was lucky enough to have mostly fine weather over Easter. A couple of times I drove to the coast and stayed in a beach front hotel in Eastbourne, with its dramatic white chalk cliffs,
it made an ideal base.
Its also my first time with a Lensbaby Compositor to try-out in cooler climes with their more opalescent light are ideal for the soft retro look. However, you still need to take care in over-bright, flat light conditions. Thus, most of my pictures from this trip were taken during the golden hour in the morning or evening.

With Britain's real high and low tides, you get these lovely wide expanses of wet reflective sand, something we don't get in the almost tideless Mediterranean!
Armed with tall wellingtons, I paddled out, when these three girls ran past, facing the setting sun I quickly snapped a few silhouetted pictures of them, this one is the best, but perhaps sensing a camera, the final girl running did an amazing cartwheel! I hope to try and rescue this more blurry image later..

The processing was fairly simple, just two Spring Painterly textures. And btw, the Lensbaby had no apertures inside, as I like as much light as possible to reach the camera. The sweet spot being towards the top of this portrait orientated image.

The bottom of the image was fairly dark, so I lightened it to the base image shown, then added these two textures;
Opal - Overly @ 100%
Creme Anglaise - Overly @ 100%

See it larger on Flickr

Spring Painterly Pack

40 Large Textures (38 square and two huge rectangles) for only

$40

Summer Painterly Pack

36 large textures for only $40

Complete Flypaper Package

Tex Box 1, Tex box 2, Fly Edges, Summer Painterly & Spring Painterly

$180

Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

See all our packs and deals on one Page

Mirage

I never tire of the beach! I visit this city beach on a regular basis and it's different every time I go. On this occasion the sea fog combined with a very low tide provided wonderful shooting conditions, if the sun had peeked through the clouds that would have been the icing on the cake but unfortunately it didn't cooperate.
I've just made a Redbubble Calendar of my Flypaper flowers, perhaps I should do a beach one too :-)

The starting image you see above has already been toned blue using various adjustments.
Then it was texture time...
Pistachio @ Overlay 25%
Lavender Skies @ Soft light 100%
Brushed Rose @ Overlay 68%
Then I merged visible Ctrl -Alt-Shift-E and used the PS5 fake HDR adjustment on the merged layers to enhance contrast and colour.
I then added
Brushed Rose @ Linear light 23% and desaturated a little, removed from the lower portion using a graduated mask.
Curves adjustment to brighten the foreground.

See it on Flickr

Summer Painterly Pack

36 large textures for only $40

Flypaper Triple Combo Deal
$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Tex Box One and  Tex Box Two

Fly Edges Pack

Only $40

Gift Coupons

Click Here

See all our packs and deals on one Page

Walking the dog

At this time of the year when our evenings are long and it doesn't get dark until around 10pm so we often go for a walk on the beach after dinner.
We weren't alone at the beach this night, as well as the few walkers, runners and dogs there was also a solitary sea-lion basking in the evening sun.
This was taken just before the sun disappeared behind the headland at the south end of the beach.

This was processed fairly simply.
First I duplicated the background and changed the blending mode to Soft light and reduced the opacity to 68%, this had the effect of increasing the contrast a little
The two textures I used were
Muscatel from pack 2 @ Soft Light 65%
Caramel Soft from pack 1 @ overlay 25%

red box

Back in early July we made a special trip to the beach at sunset just to photograph the full moon rising over the Mediterranean.
The light was superbly opalescent, and I was lucky, as I captured several nice images as well as the later moonrise.

This is one, a huge red container, not sure why it was there or what it contained, but being this amazing rust,
the final rays of the sun turned it into a stunning bright red.

The base image has already been brightened, I only needed a texture to beef up the tones and give a slight vignette effect.
I chose just one, Caramel Cream - soft light Opacity - @ 45%
This was given the full 'Gaussian blur' treatment for a really smooth finish.
I gave the final image a clean up with a slight paint effect, and removed a group of people on the left with the clone tool.
If you look on my Redbubble thread, you'll see another more painterly version.