Ranunculus

The garden is going crazy right now so it's hard to keep up with processing my photos. And if I get them done it might be awhile before I get around to posting them anywhere in cyberspace. (You can check Flickr for a few recents.) 

But I bought these luscious red ranunculus at the grocer last week and have tried to 'use' them up.  And I found this great window for $11. Some ideas I haven't gotten around to doing yet but I've had fun processing these. 

Some shot with my Canon and processed in Lightroom. I've used presets plus some tweaking.

Of course they were red but look so good desaturated. Some have even turned orange as they've aged.

Pretty Presets, Color Lux, Champagne

My own Preset, Crystal's Porch.

Pretty Presets, Clean and Creative Workflow

Pretty Presets, Color Lux, Honeydew

Pretty Presets, Clean and Creative Workflow

Kim Klassen, KK_Shadows

Preset 300v1 (I've had this for years, not sure where it's from.)

Oh, so hard to pick a favorite!

Kim Klassen Light & Airy Film Preset with some added light effects.

I've cleaned this one up and sent it to my iPad. I rarely edit my Canon photos there but love to do it once in awhile.

Monday I'll be posting some I did with the iPhone and edited for Mobile Art Monday. 

See you then and have a great weekend!

Friday Finds -Bottles and Poppies

I've pretty much reached the end of my studio reorganization. At least I can work in it now and I still have a few empty shelves in the closet. Yes!

While going through everything' I found some old photos and memorabilia that brought back wonderful memories. I also found a small box of tiny bottles bought in a garage sale 2 summers ago. Best find ever! 

(iPhone, Snapseed, Stackables)

I set them up and waited for a morning I could pick some poppies and shoot away. I also found I was going to have to rearrange just a bit more so my body is not in the way of my morning light.

I was fretting early this spring that I might not have many poppies because the rabbits kept eating them. Unfortunately our little pellet gun is not sighted in correctly. We missed a whole lot more than we hit. But they survived in a few spots, one being next to the bird bath. I about died when I walked out a couple days ago and saw this.

(iPhone, Enlight app)

I tried to capture the same thing on the Canon but it's not quite the same.

More shots I found time to edit yesterday. I've made a preset that brings out the detail in the red and applied it to all of these. Then added another on top of some.

Added kk_serendipitous. (ISO 160 100mm f/5.6 1/180sec)

Added kk_serendipitous. (ISO 160 100mm f/5.6 1/180sec)

An old preset of Kim's called AutumnCopperII. (ISO 100 100mm f/4 1/250sec)

Added kk_lightandairyfilm. (ISO 100 100mm f/4.5 1/180sec)

Here's a before and after so you can see how the 'red' changes. Exactly one year ago I gave the details on my blog for these settings. Check out 'Shooting Red'.

Joining Kim for Friday Finds!

Shooting Red

Wow! Friday again! It's time for Friday Finds. Come on over to Kim's blog today and see what kind of great goodies everyone has found/discovered this week.

I'll warn you right now I may be opening a huge can of worms with few answers. And maybe a few of you can help shed a little more light on this subject.
Last year while processing my poppy photos I discovered I could bring a lot of detail out in the petals. In Lightroom in the HSL panel I decreased the saturation of the red slider and increased the luminance of the red slider. This seemed satisfactory. In some photos decreasing the luminance worked better. So a made a preset called Red Poppy Fix.
Last week as I watched photos "loading" they would change after a brief second to more saturated. It was more obvious with the poppies so that got me to thinking. (I import mine with 'minimal' previews so it takes a couple seconds.) Thinking about color space and camera calibration that is. I knew my camera was set to Adobe RGB. So I took a couple shots with it set that way and then changed it to sRGB. I really couldn't tell any difference. (I may have moved around to much to have let the light be accurate though.) I decided this didn't prove anything but I was trying to cover all my bases.
This is what my camera was set to as far as Picture Style goes.

So I checked to see what Lightroom showed in the Camera Calibration Panel. (Last one on the right.) It was set to Adobe Standard.  Here is what that looked like. The red is quite bright and a little flat looking in areas. Some of my photos were much 'flatter' than this one.

If you click on the arrows you'll see more choices.

Here is Camera Neutral.

OK, more detail is showing up but the color is poor.

Here is Camera Standard. It looks like more detail is showing than Adobe Standard, so perhaps I should use this as default? For some reason I switched it back to Adobe Standard to finish editing.

I stumbled across a preset that made the poppies extremely dark but the detail was awesome. So I made adjustments in the HSL Panel to get this.

If that's not enough, let's add a slight Split Tone for a slight change.

Here are a few more shots with the HSL and split tone applied. It makes dark rich lovely red, but you can tweak it to your hearts content and save your own version of this preset.

Before:

After:

Before:

After, with a few additional adjustments:

After all this playing around I decided to recheck the Camera Profile settings and found Adobe Standard still looked the best after edits. Perhaps I should have started with Camera Standard to see where that would have taken me. 

Now if I had time to dig some worms I would have finished off with them. 

Hope this was thought provoking as you're shooting some red this summer. And I challenge you to give this this a try on some of your red shots. 

Have a great weekend!

Come Here Mr. Cardinal

As we came home one night this week my Friday Finds was flying around in the front yard. For the first time EVER I saw 2 cardinals in our yard! I was yelling "red birds, red birds!" as hubby stopped at the end of our driveway so he wouldn't scare them away (he is so good to cooperate with out asking). I snuck into the garage and peaked out the window to see where they were.
I was able to grab only one photo that his beak wasn't too far behind the branch. Then he flew off to catch up with his buddy. Probably looking for girls. I was excited beyond measure.

Only once before had I been closer to a cardinal and that was last year about this time when we were in Corpus Christi. I was in 'birding' heaven. I felt a little out of place with a camera when everyone else in the park was sporting binoculars. The next two shots are from there.

I think the females are very striking in their own way.

It's a shame I haven't ever processed the photos from this trip. (except for a bunch on my iPhone and iPad.) They are keyword-ed however. I think I got side-tracked by a grand-daughter's first birthday and processing a million shots. I AM getting better about deleting so so photos these days! (Or so she thinks.)

Come check out what everyone has found this week at Friday Finds.

Have an awesome weekend filled with signs of Spring!

Photo Heart Connection Feb 2014

This photo sums up my heart connection to my photography this past month.
I am a collector. My (non-blood) grand-daughter is a collector. She collects rocks and leaves  and I'm just thrilled about that.
I collected rocks when I was a little girl. The sparkles fascinated me. We had lots of quartz and granite on the farm. I collect rocks now. In fact a few years ago I asked for a pallet of flagstone for my birthday. I finally went and got it myself.
One of my online friends is also a collector. I'm sure I would think I'd died and gone to heaven if I visited her place. I got a package of her goodies this month from her Etsy shop and had so much fun playing with photo still life set ups that I didn't get much photography homework done. But I just smile when I cruise my Lightroom library and see all the red shots. Thanks Amy for sharing your collection with me.
I'm not a pack rat, (although hubby is beginning to wonder) I AM a collector.
Linking up with Kat Sloma for Photo-heart connection.

A collage of some of my faves.

Texture Tuesday Feb 24

One of my favorite red photos this month that I've been saving for a texture. 

Shot with my Lens Baby, which I'm still not comfortable with.

This is my first try on some funky word art. I love Rhonna Designs for iPhone and iPad editing. She has tons of word art that inspired this. And you can get stuff for use on the computer HERE.

Joining Kim today for Texture Tuesday. kk_simple, color burn 53%, kk_simple, divide 64%

Friday Finds Feb 21

This morning I found that it had been 8 days since I last unloaded my camera. (Normally that's not unusual but these past 2 months I had been more on top of this.) There were some interesting goodies there, however I don't have time to process them before I head to work. So I'll bid you a fabulous weekend with some of my favorite 'reds'!

Linking up with Kim for Friday Finds.

Texture Tuesday Feb 18

Time for Texture Tuesday and I'm still not done with red. I did some pastels yesterday however, in case you missed this iphoneography post.

Canon 50mm, f2.8, 1/750s, ISO100

I used this Lightroom Preset on my photo. Colorful HDR Effect 1. You can find it HERE.
Textured with Kim's kk_waterfront10 screen 32%, kk_waterfront28 linear burn 100%.
Elements from Organic Red.
Linking up with Kim for Texture Tuesday.
I've just finished a video on making custom shadows in Photoshop for you are interested HERE.

Friday Finds

Besides finding a lost love in the color red…

I actually found the inspiration to make a digital scrapbook kit. Part of that came from Amy's (Four Corners  Designs) luscious goodies I got in her mixed media package. (sigh….. maybe I should order the green one too.)

I'm finding a new appreciation for my 50mm lens. I've used it on the grand-daughter a lot this month. I even did a movie but unfortunately had turned it vertical before I realized what I was doing. I'm hoping I can rotate it in iMovie. They are just too precious. I'll do a little splice job on them soon and post it.

I walked into the house today to find a GORGEOUS vase with pink gerbers. It was actually a 'pitcher' that you'll see in lost of photos in the very near future. The light was too not right for a photo tonight. I'll just have to be patient and wait til morning. (I told hubby on Tuesday that he just needed to go get my flowers rather than have them wasting good time just sitting at the store. So he came through at least one day early.) He did good. I was shocked. I think I even squealed. I told him in 'passing' at the grocery store that I loved that pitcher. (They have an awesome gift department!)

I found out yesterday that the grand-daughter peed in the potty. Got a text and photo to prove it. She had moved her little potty chair into the living room on the carpet and was unrolling the toilet paper. Ten minutes later I got another text saying she did it again! She's 22 months. Last week she sat on the 'big potty' at our house with help and pulled off paper, wiped her nose and threw it behind her where it should go. She did that 4 times and 'Mia' said Yea, All done! Then we exited the room having made no sound of 'running water'.

Here she is featured with my new kit Organic Red. You can get it here if you like to do digital things. It's on sale and if you use the code blogbuddies2014 you get an additional 50% off any price. That code is good all year long, anytime, for anything.
A special thanks to my friend Viv who made up some page samples for me this week. Check out her blog here.

Linking up with Kim for Friday Finds

and Nancy for Random Five Friday

Painterly Edits 1 -Introducing Waterlogue

Version 1 (All edits done on iPad)
This is the original photo. (Gosh I was even too lazy to crop this… in the end it didn't matter.)

This is my first edit in Waterlogue, setting - Normal.

My favorite watercolor painted look is with line drawing added. You can nearly achieve this look with the Industrial setting. It didn't have much 'wet' action on the paint though.

This is the way I typically do my watercolor line drawing edits. I'll take the original into iColorama and choose Style>Edges, and pick one of the presets to get a black and white drawing with the size lines and amount of lines I want and save it.

Then I'll open up both edited photos in Image Blender. The painted version on the bottom. (Second photo above.) The line drawing on the top. Change the blending mode to Multiply so the white will disappear leaving only the lines. By default it sets the opacity at 50%. So you may need to increase it. If you want to mask out some of the lines, that is possible here too. I masked out some of the edges.

Version 2

I took the original (first photo above) back into iColorama and found this great color under Style>Sketch>2. So I just had to try it in Waterlogue.

I used the Industrial setting to achieve this.

Very similar results. The only drawback in Waterlogue is that you won't have control over the line drawing. But a similar effect is achieved with just one app.