[DannyRaphael]

Pretend it's Spring: This one should bring out the best in your photo-art skills!

Photo by M. Plansky.

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~Danny~

[debm]

I adore this photo! Here is one interpretation....

[jch71566]

Nice work Debm.

Here's mine. boss-emboss, atherize background, sharpen foreground, etc.

-Jeff

[Cheryl H]

debm--nice job brightening the colors.

Jeff--nice color shift in the background--it makes it look more like it has a garden backdrop than the original brown tones

I played with several variations on this photo, but in the end decided I liked the look provided by Mike Finn's instasketch beta the best. http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~mikefinn/action.html

[Xaran]

I played with this one for quite a while and eventually finished up with this version.

Christine

[DannyRaphael]

Now that we're past January 1, I can get caught up with a few of these I've missed.

I was messing with an action I wrote 10/03 and modified 01/04 and tried it on our butterfly. The action can be downloaded here.

After running the action I restored a little detail on layer F2 I created a new layer just below F2 and merged all layers (except F2 and the texture layer) and applied the following filters the merged layer:

Stained glass, spatter, angled strokes, spatter, ocean ripple, glass, angled stroke, unsharp mask, diffiuse>anisotropic, angled strokes, unsharp mask, diffiuse>anisotropic (again), fade>diffuse.
[I was trying to make a decent looking background. I didn't like the one the action created.]

(If your're wondering what planet I was on with all these filters, the answer really is, Earth." This was an exercise in experimenting with various effects one after another, trying to come up with a favorable (to me) texture look. It's just another example of how sometimes you've just got to try things. The filters and sequence were captured from the History Palette. Sorry, no settings.)

This conglomeration was selectively applied to layers below using a layer mask. I liked the results in general, but all the strokes were going in the same direction. Not good.

So I duplicated this layer, deleted the layer mask, select > all, Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal (strokes go the opposite direction), Edit > Transform > Free Transform (rotated clockwise a bit), added a new layer mask and and applied "strokes" from this layer, too.

Tried different opacities on these texture layers.

It was about time for Law and Order: CI to come on, so I decided to give it a rest. Turned on the texture layer and added the 3 pixel stroke frame.

And they lived happily every after.

~Danny~

[Duv]

Had this shot of a Caterpillar smokin a Hooka last summer and thought it might fit.

Cheers
Duv

[Duv]

Oops. I forgot my pet frog.

Cheers
Duv