28.6.07

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.

7 comments:

Francesca said...

You did a great job there, it looks lovely and so does the model - so cute!
Photoshop is great to play with isn't it? I don't know what I'd do without it.

Artists With Artitude said...

Oh I miss you all so much. Rima, these are really good pix. I think you may have found your calling, combining your artistic flair with your tech know-how, without making it all look artificial.Your work is quite painterly. Looking forward to seeing a lot more, sis!!!

Bobbie said...

I must try your method on a photo. I am just learning photoshop which Debi kindly gave me. It had been on my wish list for a very long time. I'm impressed with what you have done to this photo.

Belinha Fernandes said...

Well, I hope not!!Paper and scissor rules!!:-)

Debi said...

Thank you for sharing your process and ideas, Rima. You once mentioned a photoshop challenge for your readers. I still think that would be interesting. You should make the rule, though, they have to tell what they did. (Tricky way to get new ideas, eh?)

Rima said...

Thanks everyone for all the kind comments - this is a fun art-alteration-digitization thingy that I do enjoy very much, so hopefully, I'll be doing a lot more with it.

As for a photoshop "challenge": Zan the man used to do watercolour workshops on the gallery website, where there's a lot of space and elbow room to post works. I've been thinking of taking this up again, do a photoshop/digital workshop, another one with collage, and a mixed media one. I just need to get organized - let's hope it doesn't take me until the next century to do that.

dianeclancy said...

Thank you, Rima, for sharing this process ... it is fun to see. Keep posting!!

~ Diane Clancy
www.dianeclancy.com/blog