Be Still Week 39

Subject: Glass
I'm not much the pink frilly girly roses type. But when I recently rediscovered these two pink pieces, one at work and the other in my china cabinet, I decided to try and pull something together with them.

kk_gentle was used on the first two. It is one of my favorites.

kk_bare

kk_hazey, gentle and chocolate (starting at the left)

KK_bare on these three.

I had more fun that day. First I played in the dining room on the chair, then took everything into my 'studio'. I thought I was finished after I started pulling out the doilies but then I grabbed some books, ditched the glass and you'll have to wait until later to see those.

Simple

Some more shots from my June draft pile. Pretty sure this was homework for Be Still, but I'm not sure.

How about one with a texture by Kim? Pinitonly6 turned to black and white and darkened to be able to 'screen' my photo over it.

It's Texture Tuesday over at Kim's blog today. 

Come on over and check out what everyone's been texturing.

Pristine, Not So White

I have one lovely white iris that grows at work. This one managed to escape the freeze.
Shot with Canon 100m Macro, edited in Lightroom.
This was not how I had thought my final edit would be. So I'll walk you through what I did.
This was my first attempt.

After a few 'normal' adjustments, I lowered the saturation to zero in the basic panel (except for the 2 on the left). Even though the flower was white, there was still color in the images. On those two images I used the adjustment brush to desaturate all but the area I wanted left yellow. I really liked the whiteness of it, that's why the title is Pristine.
The collage was then created in the Print Module of Lightroom and exported as a jpg instead of printing.
Now into Photoshop: I duplicated my layer. With the magic wand tool I selected the white background, held down the option/alt key and clicked on the Adjustment Mask icon in the layers panel. This automatically puts the mask on the opposite of the selection. (I could have just deleted it....)
In Photoshop I tweaked the levels a touch and masked the image in the upper left corner because it was already dark enough.
I still wasn't happy with the way my black and white images looked. Too gray for my taste. So I added my favorite way to 'tint' a photo in Photoshop. This is an excellent way to get a more cohesive look to a group of images or just tint black and white images.
Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color. Change the blend mode to soft light and click ok.

Pick a light shade of your choosing. You can alway lower the opacity of this layer. Mine is 35% At any time you can double click the color thumbnail to change or tweak the color. I decided to play around and add a second color to mine. Love the touch of warmth it added.

I wanted a subtle background pattern, I clicked on my background layer and added an overlay from the Allyse Overlays kit, #3 and lowered the opacity to 25%.
My tint layer is also coloring my background. If you don't want this, clip the tint layer to the photo layer below. In this case I would need to merge my levels layer down first. Choose the levels layer, right click and choose merge down.
To clip the tint layer to the photo layer, you have several choices.
1. Hover your mouse between the 2 layers with the option/alt key held down, when the 2-colored circle (or square in CS6) with a down-facing arrow shows up, click.
2. Select the top layer,  Go to Layer> Create Clipping Mask
3. Shift/Command/G or that would be Shift/Control/G on a PC.
Another option is to mask it like we did the background copy layer.
I added the 'Pristine' title using the font, Sweetly Broken (Dafont) a favorite.
By the way, what's blooming in your garden?
Have a super blessed weekend!

Studio Makeover

One of the things on my To Do List for this year was to revamp what was originally my sewing room. I discovered a cool way to do before and after photos of rooms was to do a camera phone panorama. (We'll get into details later in this post, but I did use Photosynth on these.)

A. My green wall was full of faux finish experiments from 11 years ago including joint compound swiped over stencils. Time for white.
B. My bubble gum pink corner was a reading nook that I decided to turn into small photo shoot area. Time for white and new curtains. Used the trim to finish out around the rest of the ceiling. (Which doesn't show on the photo.)
C. Made a dream board (which is much fuller now). I hot glued upholstery-weight fabric to insulation board. Then attached industrial strength velcro to it and the closet door.
D. Hung 2 new shelves. The lower one holding some art supplies because the table gets sooooo cluttered.
E. Finally hung some of my photos and art on the walls.
F. General clean up and organization.
G. I still hope to recover the lamp shade and get rid of or switch out the chair to a smaller one.
For several weeks it stayed nice and clean. That was because I would just go in and look and go, ahhhhh..... Now it's a mess again. Perhaps today I will clean it a bit and get back to some messing in some paint.

Panoramas

As I said these were taken with Photosynth. The disadvantage with it as you can see is that they need cropping. That can also BE an advantage depending on your needs. Also I was able to nearly get a 360º circles worth. Here's an interesting article on Photosynth.

In the native iPhone camera app, it crops for you automatically. It also flashes move up or move down if it senses you're getting off track. Very nice feature. 

Last week we were able to fly our Bonanza to the the Texas coast and had the most amazing clouds to fly through. I hadn't thought of doing panoramas in the 'air' before. Quite addicting if the clouds are awesome.

It does have a little glare that I could take out in photoshop if I feel ambitious enough. But I just discovered this gem that I will be ordering today. A polarizing filter for my iPhone from Photojojo.

Perhaps I'll take some panos of every room in the house, just for recording sake. Perhaps a scrapbook page. hmmmm.

Last of Winter

Remnants of our once in a blue moon blizzard. Right out the front door sits this planter of volunteers. Johnny Jump-ups (violas) and an asparagus (it will get pulled). It was totally buried in snow until the middle of the afternoon when it warmed up so fast there was none left on the porch.

I took this through the window. I was actually surprised to have caught little bokeh lights.

A few icicles forming in the midst of the storm.

While we're on the subject of white things, here is a 'shot from above' with 2 of my 'usual' props. I rather liked the out of focusness of it. Textured with Sybil by Kim Klassen and I used all 3 brushes from Beyond Beyond Class Day 7 white, 100% set at soft light. Must say I love it. Especially with the brushes added.

All edits in Lightroom.