Little Butterfly Deconstructed

Now that I've broken this little dry spell, and thanks to Debi's kind comment (as always), I thought I might as well use the latest post to talk about using Photoshop for altering images.

I started out with this adorable snapshot of my little ballerina at her recital about 4 weeks ago, and used it to play around in Photoshop. I liked what I came up with enough to post it here.

(Before)

I started by using the blur tool in the background, but used a shaped brush - I'm not sure how much of an impact this had, but I feel it did soften the edges.

I then decided to turn it into a grayscale image to see how the special effects filters would come out. I settled on rough pastels with a bit of texture.

I then used the magic wand tool to highlight part of the image and used the paint bucket/gradient tools to fill in various parts with varying degrees of opacity and different colours.

(After)

It's really fun to take a picture like that, and alter it with this really magical program. It's a tool that's really as good as your own imagination. Although I do have to admit, sometimes it is also hugely frustrating - but as the old (French) saying goes: "There are no bad tools, only bad workers".

Even if I end up chucking hours of work to my laptop's recycle bin in utter disgust, I'm still drawn to playing around with some image on this really cool tool almost every day. It's like doodling, only better.