Yesterday, in Part 1, I introduced some steps to create art from a photograph. Today I’m going to show you how all these new layers and images can blend together to create yet more art. As a reminder, here are the layers that I am working with:

original photo/background image for art (c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

1st layer, filtered (c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

2nd layer, filtered (c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

3rd layer, filtered (c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

4th layer, filtered (c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

To see each of these new layers blended with the original image be sure and visit the previous post! This next photo shows the “Layers” window on the screen in Photoshop Elements with all of the layers visible.

"Layers" window

With all the layers blended and visible (layers are visible in your art when the “eye” on the left of the layers window next to it is visible) the final image looks like this:

"not dealing with reality" photo art (c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

In part 3 of this demo I will show you what can be created by making one or more of the layers “invisible” and taking it out of the image.

More tomorrow!

Lynne

Here’s a photo from a couple of weekends ago, I think. This is the new Trump Tower under construction in Toronto. It’s going to be one ostentatious building, as you can imagine. I hear The Plaza in NY is supposed to be quite the hotel so I wouldn’t expect much less in Toronto. Anyway, hope you like it. If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you might recall I took a photo of this crane at night during my first official night outing. Click here to see it.

Here’s a nice photo of two lovebirds enjoying the sunset at Bluffer’s Park in Scarborough (east Toronto). This one is from my Saturday afternoon outing. As you can see, the smudge issue is pretty much non-existent in this one.

Here’s another photo from yesterday. I also shot the whole boat but thought the colours of the mast with the blue background really worked. If you look closely, you can still see the smudge, albeit faintly.

I love this time of year in the garden…

each and every day I find something new!

After looking through my earlier posts about digital/photo art I realized I hadn’t ever done any kind of “how to” posts. Well, that ends today! I’m going to do a show & tell of fairly simple steps you can take to change a normal photo into something more artistic. I’m starting with an image I took of leftover collage scraps.  I like that they have lots of bold colors & lines. Plus I’m just a sucker for words so that didn’t hurt anything either!

"not dealing with reality" photograph (c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

For this demo I am using Photoshop Elements. I am sure there are other programs out there that use filters & layers, which is all we’ll need for this exercise. The first step I took was to make a duplicate layer of the same image (this can be done by right clicking on image in the layers window shown below or by selecting “duplicate layer” in layers tab at the top of the screen). I then used a filter on the duplicate (the first of the following three images) to create a new image.  The filters tab is at the top of the page, when you click on it there is a drop-down menu with a large selection of filters for you to experiment with. The filtered layer was then combined with the original layer, which I’m using as a background.  There are many different blended tools available to combine the layers of an image, I chose the “overlay” effect to blend the two together, which in turn created another new image (the last of the three images shown below).

(c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

Next I made another copy of the background layer/original image. I applied a different filter to that layer, creating another new image and then – like the first new layer – blended this new image with the background/original.

(c) 2010, Lynne Medsker

This is a photo of the layers window that shows each of the individual layers in the “Layers” window. The one that is highlighted is the one that you are currently editing (background copy 3 in this case). In this photo I clicked on the blending modes so you could see all the different options available for blending your images. I routinely try most of them to view how they blend before deciding which version I like best.

blending changes in Photoshop Elements

After the second layer I added two more layers with different filters, effects and blending tools, shown here:

third layer

forth layer

I know I’ve thrown a lot out all in one post but I didn’t know how else to divide up the steps! Part 2 of 3 will show how all these layers come together into one image and beyond.

Click, click, click,

Lynne

First, some good news. I spent the day out shooting with Mauro, expecting to see disappointing smudges throughout my collection of shots upon downloading them to the computer. To my surprise, the smudges show up in only the odd photo. Most appear to be smudge free. Not sure why. Don’t really care. I’ll be buying a new camera within the next week or two.

As for this photo, it’s from today’s outing. The Canadian Malting Company silos are located on the waterfront in Toronto — hence the water in the shot. As you can see, it’s smudge free. Yay! Anyway, I’ve got a ton of photos to edit from this weekend. And a ton more from the previous few weekends. Sucks to be me right now. Plus, I’ve got an Oscars celebration to watch.

Well I just got in from my second long day out and about taking photos. This time it was with my friend Mauro. We hiked around downtown again, stopping for a nice lunch of course, and I think we got some nice shots. I’m about to upload them now so I won’t know how they came out for a while. As you know, my camera is now officially toast, but like they say, when all you’ve got is toast you make lemonade, right? I’ll post my first photo from today a bit later, but for now here’s s another photo from yesterday’s outing. As you can see, the smudge issue is not present in all the photos. This one was taken down where the Gardiner Expressway meets the Don Valley Parkway. Hope you like it.

Smudges clearly visible in photos of the sky. I dialled up the contrast to show them better.

As you can see, there are smudges in this photo (the most visible smudge it just above the bird’s right wing). When I wrote about them last night I assumed they were on the lens, but after a thorough cleaning (I even ran the camera through the dishwasher–kidding) the smudges are still present. Verdict: My camera is broken. Those smudges must be on the sensor, likely caused when I dropped it. Looks like I’ll be getting a new camera sooner than I thought. It’s a drag, though, because I was hoping to keep this camera as a spare for times when I didn’t want to take out the big DSLR. I’m going to hit the camera store downtown today and see if there’s any chance of a quick fix, but it’s very unlikely. Oh well. Crying over spilt milk won’t get it back into the bottle, right.