I was in the mood to do something creative this morning, so I took a photo of an American flag (similar to this U.S. flag photograph, both shots were taken at the Asbury Park boardwalk last year) and imposed it over a recent shot that I took of the rudbeckia in my garden. I used a mask in Photoshop to get the background of flowers to appear under the flag. The difficult part is the edges – one carefully has to go around and eliminate all the sky edges from the original photograph.
Happy Fourth of July.
Here are the two original photos used to create the image above:
The top one of rudbeckia or black eyed susans was taken in my front yard. The bottom one depicts a U.S. flag flying on the Asbury Park boardwalk.
I saw one then two then three deer in a neighbor’s backyard. I approached them with my camera, and they backed into this corner. Then two hopped the fence. The last one stayed behind and nibbled an evergreen bush. New Jersey is getting so developed the deer are living everywhere, or so it seems.
This rabbit seems to be living in our backyard. I saw him twice yesterday.
My neighbor’s magnolia tree has started to blossom. You can see the buds of the magnolia on this post. The yellow background in this photo is from the forsythia.
I decided to give my magnolia blossom a blue background.
Unlike the original story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, in which many children may have died of the plague, the Pied Piper of Highland Park is the story of a girl who likes to put on a show. And her mother who likes to play with Photoshop.
Her mother took all the background out of the original photo, except for a little on the right, after converting to sepia. Except for the red ribbon and the girl’s face.
A Photoshop brush of a star helped create a vibrant background. No rats were involved in this Highland Park project. And no children died of the plague. Thank goodness!
You can see a full color version of this mosaic wall at Raritan Valley Community College in this post. To put this in sepia, I copied the original photo to a new layer in Photoshop, desaturated the photo, added yellow and red to get sepia, and then set the opacity of the sepia layer to 90% so just a wee bit of color would show through. I wanted to use the sepia effect to emphasize the textures of the mosaic.
I love the way portraits look in sepia. I took a piece of a photo that my son took and used this tutorial called Basic Sepia Tone Old Effect. In the tutorial it suggests changing the whole image to Grayscale; instead, I just used Desaturate on one layer in Photoshop.
Here is the original cropped section of the photo in full color. I used the clone stamp tool to change my husband’s bright lime t-shirt into the coloring of the tree behind. Here’s a good tutorial that demonstrates the use of the clone stamp tool.
Snow by the Pond in Donaldson Park, Middlesex County, New Jersey
We went sledding in Donaldson Park on Sunday, and in the distance I could see both the icy pond and the Raritan River beyond the pond.
I took the photos from a sledding hill far from the river. My original photos had a blue cast; if you have Photoshop, you can use this video to learn how to remove a colored cast from a photo using Levels.
Fourth Night of Chanukah
Each night of Chanukah we light one more candle, until by the eighth night we have eight candles lit. This is to remember the miracle that happened in the Temple a long time ago, when one little container of oil that should have lasted for only one day lasted for eight. In the photo are four orange candles for the fourth night, and the purple one called the “shamash.” The shamash is an extra one, the helper; the shamash lights the other candles. One can choose any colors; my daughter picked these colors. My sons and husband use an oil chanukiah (menorah), as the one in the Temple used oil.
I’ve been taking many photos of the lights, or as the title of this post declares, I’ve been “playing with fire.” Here’s the photo of the candles on a jar, using the warp tool in Photoshop as instructed in this tutorial on the warp tool effect.
We visited Allaire State Park back in early November. Here are some of the doors and windows of that pretty park. The above building in the historical village was closed, but many were open.
Strictly speaking, this is not a door or a window, but it is OPEN – so it’s like a gateway to the bakery. I enhanced the saturation of the colors in Photoshop.
We were able to visit the original home of the Allaire family. As I said on a previous post, we were not allowed to photograph inside, but here’s the doorway to that interesting home. It was said to still be inhabited by a descendant of the original Allaire founder in the 1950’s, and that 1950’s owner kept a horse in his kitchen. Eccentric.
This was a vertical photo, so I increased the canvas size to make it horizontal, and then I used the clone stamp tool and the blur tool to get the main part of the photo to extend a bit into the side areas.
What is that white board that looks like a door but is curiously up too high to be a door? Where there once steps there? I didn’t notice this until today, when I was looking through these photos. Does that happen to you; do you find mysteries in your photos that you didn’t recognize when you were on the scene?
These are windows in the train of the Pine Creek Railroad, which is next to the Historical Village. The train ride just goes around in circles, but we did get to see some deer as we circled about.
For more windows and doors, visit Window Views (hosted by Mary the Teach):
Watercolor Effect Applied to Photo of Girl Walking in Creek
I took several photos of my daughter’s adventurous friend walking in the creek at Howell Farm in Mercer County, New Jersey.
Creek Walk with Colors, Photo taken in August 2009 at Howell Farm, New Jersey
