Creating A Rainbow Daisy With PSE 5.0

Earlier this week I dug out an old photo of a yellow daisy and had a little fun with it!

I thought “I wonder what this daisy would look like if it were rainbow-colored?”.

So I colored it!

First I simply selected a few petals for each color using the lasso tool and copied them to new layers; one layer for each color.

Then I played with the hue/saturation tool on each of these layers to change the color of the petals from their original yellow to shades of red, orange, green, blue, and purple. I left the layer for the yellow petals alone; except for to remove the background from it.

I painted over the original background layer with a nice dark black to make the colors pop.

Once I was happy with the way it was looking I flattened the image. You  might want to play a bit with the blending mode of each layer for a new look but for this image it really wasn’t necessary.

I then copied the flattened image to two more layers; on the first one I added the sponge filter while on the top layer I added the water-color filter.

Now you could stop here but when have you ever known me to leave well enough alone?

I went on to play with the blending modes on these “painted” layers and then finally played with the lighting effects to finish it off.

It really did go just about that fast!

and now I have a fun new springtime image for KKHPhotos.com and I’m sure it will appear on more than a few Zazzle products as well.

What kind of fun digital art have you created lately?? Please share in the comments!

Watercolor Painting With PS Elements 5.0 In 5 Easy Steps

I came across this tutorial the other day and gave it a try this morning; it sounded easy enough.

1) Open your photo and duplicate that background layer three times.

2) Turn off the top two layers and work on the first layer. On that first layer apply the cutout filter; Filter-> Artistic-> Cutout-> set the number of levels to around 4, edge simplicity to around 4, and edge fidelity to around 2. Change the blending mode of this layer to luminosity.

3) Turn on the next layer up. Working on this second layer apply the dry brush filter; Filter-> Artistic-> Dry Brush-> set the brush size to around 10, the brush detail to around 10, and the texture option to around 3. Chang the blending mode of this layer to screen.

4) Turn of the last layer. Working on this third layer apply the median filter; Noise-> Median-> set the radius value to around 12 pixels. Change the blending mode of this layer to soft light.

5) Flatten your image, give it a name, and save it!

Here’s a few examples of my experiments with this so far…

I think a brighter more colorful image will produce better results; I’ll have to revisit this again soon.

Not So Surreal

So I’m not going to be known for awesome surreal landscapes anytime soon but this was fun to play with.

I don’t have a tutorial or any tips; this is really just a random photo I thought I’d share. I’ve seen many awesome surreal images and wanted to play with the idea myself. While looking for tips on how to do this I did find something kind of useful; I found quick post on Faking A Photoshop Layer Mask In Photoshop Elements.

All I really did was layer several photos, or parts of photos, and create this fake layer mask between them to help blend them together. I think I need to find some more tutorials on how to do this, but for now, I took these random photos, a dot of yellow “paint”, some lighting filters, and a little time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

… and came up with this…

A Not So - Surreal Kansas Landscape

That orange sunset just kind of disappeared in there somewhere.

Yep; I have much to learn about Photoshop.

 

Fun And Easy Digital Art

I have seen some awesome digital art done by Holly over at Photo by Holly and I wondered how it was done.

Well; she has been kind to us all and created a video tutorial !! Thank you Holly!

There is no way I could improve on her instructions so I won’t even try. I’ll just tell you that if you want to know how to make these- click the link above and visit her blog.

For the three examples I’ve posted here I added a small image of the original photo so you can see what it used to be.

These are so much fun to create!

Oh, and to see another awesome example check out my friend Teri over at Images by T.Dashfield.

Enjoy!

Oh; Teri! Won’t these make some fun greeting cards???

Hum… I see a whole new gallery coming to KKHPhotos.com soon!

How To Create A Kaleidoscope With Elements 5.0

My 52 project photo last week was a kaleidoscope image that I had created out of a photo of jelly beans. I said I’d post a tutorial this week so here we go;

How I Created A Jelly Bean Kaleidoscope With Photoshop Elements 5.0

1. Open your photo. In the layers palette double-click on your background layer. Make that background into a layer you can work with by clicking OK in the dialog box.

2. a. Rotate your image 60° to the right. Image -> rotate -> custom (right – angle 60) -> OK.

2. b. Move your image into the upper right corner of the canvas so that the bottom two corners lay on the upper and right edges of the canvas. You now have a nice triangle shape. You may need to play a bit with your original image and crop away some of the bottom to get lots of color just where you want it.

2. c. Crop your image down to this new shape/size by using the magic wand to select the empty background then -> right-click -> select inverse and finally click image -> crop.

3. Resize the canvas by clicking image -> resize -> canvas size; select a width that is at least 4 times the original size, a height that is at least twice the original size, and select the top center anchor point before resizing. I think I may have made my canvas larger than this so I’d be sure to have room to work; you will crop away the extra later so it won’t hurt at all to make it bigger.

4. Duplicate this layer to a new layer. On that new layer grab the left center point of your triangle-shaped image and pull it towards the right until the ”w” in your tool bar = -100%. Merge these two layers together. All you are doing here is flipping this layer around to create a mirror image; make sure it’s up tight against the first one so that when merged they will become one image.

5. a. Duplicate this new layer and rotate it 60°. Image -> transform -> free transform then in the tool bar select the bottom center point of the 9 points -> check constrain proportions and set the angle to 60.

5. b. Duplicate the bottom layer again and repeat step 5. a. but this time set your angle to 120°.

5. c. and again with the angle set to 180°

5. d. and again with the angle set to -60°

5. e. and again with the angle set to -120° Make sure you are duplicating the bottom layer each time.

6. Add a new layer and move it into the bottom position; this layer is for filling in your background color.

7. Merge all layers.

8. Crop.

9. One last touch! Filter -> distort -> spherize -> (20% – mode normal) This last step is not a must and I’ve found some images look better with this little extra boost and some do not. You’ll just want to play around with it a bit.

10. Name it and save it!

You can take this a little further by layering the image over itself and resizing it smaller and smaller as you go to add rings of color inside. I’ve even tucked another copy of the kaleidoscope behind the original and stretched it out to fill in the space on the outside edges. See More Kaleidoscope Fun for ideas.

Now that I’ve figured out the basics of this one I’ll be testing it out on other images, I think a floral kaleidoscope might be nice.

Have fun; if you create a kaleidoscope I’d love to see it! you can link to your image in the comments below.

Here’s another one made with the same jelly bean photo; flipped upside down before I started to create the kaleidoscope image.