* please mouse over to see the SOOC shot *
I feel a little lazy to rummage through my folders and DVDs to check if I have a fitting image for this prompt, so I decided to take a new picture. The first thing I saw when I went out of the house were these bird decor, so I just took three and photographed it, using the stone washed wall as the background.
To make this edit, I did:
- Using the path tool, I created a selection around the birds and bamboo poles and after closing the paths, I inverted the selection and applied Gaussian Blur at 30%.
- Resized image to 480x640.
- Ran the Unsharp Mask tool set to default (0.50).
- Added a layer of Kim Klassen's "Warm Sun" texture set to soft light at 100%.
- Added a layer of Kim Klassen's "Mayzee" texture set to burn at 40%.
- Gave it a pass of the National Geographic script, adjusted the curves and flattened the image.
Being a point-and-shoot camera user, it was difficult to make the subject stand from the background, so I needed to blur the background during post-processing, especially if I didn't set my camera to macro mode. To achieve the "bokeh" or "depth of field" look, I do the first step on my "recipe" using the original image, as I realized it's always better to select certain parts of the image using the biggest image size possible. I also do the same thing when I needed to do color selective technique. For this particular image, not only did I use the original image size, I also had to zoom it to 150% because certain parts of the images were still "too small" at 100%.
See you next week for the Pink edition!
*** Jenn ***
