Come away with the raggle taggle gypsy-o
That’s what I thought when I saw this one at Lympstone last week. I immediately wondered how it would look with a touch of processing for Jude’s challenge this month.
I only used two steps to create this effect, first of all I cropped away a big expanse of dull brick wall and paving in the foreground. Once I was happy with the content, I tried a few filters and decided that Photoshop Elements Ink Outlines within artistic/brush strokes was all it needed.
In a local park there is a sensory garden, filled with fragrant flowers and plants that are lovely to touch. I’d love to be able to capture the scent, but the best I could manage was this photo of a seedhead on my phone.
Inspired by Jude’s bench challenge, I’ve been dabbling with editing a again recently and this pic seemed like one to try. 
So I sent it to my tablet and opened it with Pixlr, dropped it four times into a collage and tweaked the colour slightly. 
The last thing I did was to pick the creative option, Gadelf, before sending it back to Photoshop on my laptop., where I simply used enhance/auto level to get the result above.
Simple Meg?
Yesterday I published a weird photo for the Weekly Challenge. A few people thought that I should write the book to match the cover. That would never happen, even though I occasionally write something a little dark, this would be far too macabre for me.
I took the photo back in August, wandering the streets of Sidmouth during Folk week. There is always something interesting to see there, but I never thought I’d use the image, taken with my phone.
The guy in the picture was having fun rolling around the path, apparently sober and wearing a cat mask, as you do. I remember his girlfriend being ever so slightly embarrassed by his antics, but his friend was encouraging him to play.
Here is the original photo, some of you wanted to know how I created it, it was more luck than judgement.
I edited it in Photoshop, using ‘offset’ and changed it to black and white with infrared.
Here he is again really getting into a cat pose.
I used to do a lot of photo editing when I first discovered Photoshop but eventually tired of it. I learnt to colour pop, but then everywhere you looked you would see colour popped photos – boring. The current craze for instagram does little for me, it doesn’t seem to require any particular skill or eye for a good quality photo.
Then last year I did a photography course and everyone was furiously editing everything, trying every trick the software offered. It put me off even more and I concentrated on improving my camera skills. That didn’t work, my photography became worse as I struggled to get to grips with manual camera settings.
I’m gradually recovering and on a photo day I can usually get a few shots I’m happy with, probably around 5%! I have three lenses to play with and have often thought that if I just had this lens or that lens then I might get the results I want. But that’s nonsense of course, it’s all in the eye, and sometimes choosing a good way to use software to create an interesting image.
Here I have played with a photo in a few different ways, a couple of which I believe work well and some less so. Do you have an opinion to offer? Do you like some more than others? or maybe you don’t like any of them? Let me know what you think or perhaps post a few versions of a image that you have worked with. As always click for a larger view.
Lucid Gypsy 