Misty morning

This image was done for a texturing challenge over on Flickr, the starting image was kindly  provided by flickr member  Adrigu . Misty landscapes are always great to texture so I jumped at the chance to do this and thought I'd share my recipe here.

To start with I cropped the original rectangle square and roughly added some extra sky.
Serafina Sky @ Soft Light 100%
Concorde @ Overlay 100%
Copy of background @ Overlay 46%
Iridescent Brush @ Subtract  52% (subtract is a new blending mode that appeared in CS5, if you don't have CS5 you're going to have to experiment with some of the other modes)
Then I added the birds.
Brown blurred texture from seriykotik1970 @ overlay 83% this added warmth but didn't do all that much texturally. A warm colour blending mode would probably have achieved the same effect.
At this stage my photo looked like this

It was okay but needed a bit of "life" so I lightly used the fake HDR adjustment (in CS5), this brightened things and especially accentuated the painterly sky textures.  A careful curves adjustment may have achieved something similar.
Iridescent brush and Serafina Sky are from the Painterly pack, Concorde is from Tex Box 2.
See it bigger on Flickr

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morning mist

I was emailed a few weeks ago, asking how to create a mist effect
with textures. My tardy answer is now shown here (sorry Bob!)
This image was captured on the mountains last January.
I'd not used these particular images because although I shot them in raw, It still had blown out areas.
However, with our new textures it came to me just last night, a bit of a revelation! - Don't bother hiding the blow-outs, simply lighten and texture the rest of the image! :-)
Necropolis is still my all time personal favorite texture, but these days I tend to use a tweaked version. Just the other day, you might recall,
I used a dark green version?
You can create your own easily by following this tip:
With the aid of the Colour sliders at the top in photoshop I turned this texture to a dark indigo colour with the slider pushed all the way to the right. I then save and use like a new texture, the beauty of this new texture are - no warm/brown tones!
How to:
Top of Photoshop - Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation -
Hue @ +180
Saturation @-28
Lightness @ -23
Save this Texture and name it 'Necropolis Indigo' for future tutorials!
Here's my texture recipe
Necropolis (turned into an indigo blue as discussed) Opacity - Soft Light @ 89%
Necropolis (indigo blue), used on blown out highlights at the top only) Opacity - Color Burn @ 8%
Apple Blush - Opacity - Overlay @ 68%

At this point something wasn't quite right, the sky colour didn't really blend with the picture. So I flattened all my layers and started with a second onslaught of texture! This time from Tex Box Two.
If you look at the base image you'll see the bottom of the image is very dark with no mist, it wasn't really working.
So I pulled out the 'Leaden Hall' texture - don't ask me why I thought this might work - I was lucky!
I flipped this texture vertically and so the pale part was at the bottom. The Skirt at the top was pulled above the picture top and cut off.
To create the extra fog and pull together, I simply turned this Leaden Hall texture to - Opacity - Screen @ 61%
I blurred it a little and I also changed this layer to B/W and changed the colour to a green/blue with the top sliders.
I then removed the top half of the texture with a very soft eraser brush, used selectively.
Last finishing texture was:

Chlorophyll Opacity - Soft Light @ 57%
Used to just add a slight vignette at the edges.
Further colour tweaks to finish.

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