Playing with Photoshop's New Sky Replacement Tool

 

Always in the mood to learn something new, while not wanting the end result to to be like anyone else's, I decided to experiment.  Photoshop's new Sky Replacement tool has a number of nice sky presets.  But when I use them, I'm using elements I didn't create, and that anyone else can use, which is never my first choice.  So, I figured out how to insert another image into one of the Sky Replacement layers to create something that is all original. 

Top to Bottom:

1.  The original, edited photo, of a king tide shot in Bolinas, California in Jan 2018.

2.  That same shot with one of the Photoshop sky replacements.  

3.  A photo of mold growing on one of my lemons.

4.  The original photo with a close up of lemon mold replacing the Photoshop sky.  Looks like the fire sky we experienced for too long this past summer!

The Big Eye Monoprint Plus

Experimenting further with monoprints. 

Top:  The original ghost of my 1st Kala student monoprint study with added Roche pastels

Bottom:  A digital copy of the original monoprint with a photo composite overlay (middle photo) run through a Topaz Labs HDR filter.

Learning New Printmaking Techniques

First two student prints from new Berkeley KALA class on monoprinting with Charbonnel oil inks and plastic plates.  So much fun!  Printing originals, ghosts and offsets.  My one ghost was too ghostly (ie pale) so I'm going to paint or pastel over.  My one offset was so light, the top print is actually printed on the offset of the bottom print.

Seattle Pink Poppies

Sadly I no longer have a reason to travel up to Seattle a few times a year to take photos and visit family (since they moved to Portland).  But it's now fun to see how many ways I can edit the thousands of photos I' took in Seattle over the years.  The four above are from a Queen Anne poppies garden shot I photographed in 2014, starting with one unadulterated version.  The editing fun is almost as endless as the complexities of the original as created by Mother nature.

Marilyn Monroe, Floral Fantasy, and Photoshop CC Collide

I've been compulsively editing my best floral photographs, out of the thousands I've taken since I went digital.  This has given me the opportunity to not only go down memory lane, but to experiment with as many digital techniques as I can come up with to try to bring out the essence of each photo. Lately, I discovered a pattern feature in Photoshop CC I was unaware of.  Having done some fabric design previously, it was with excitement I realized I could create offset patterns in Photoshop using my illustrator art.  This has opened a whole new area in which to play.  In these four pictures I started with a beautiful field of flowers shot in Salem, Oregon in 2016 (bottom).  Moving up from there, I've combined the original photo with three alternate patterns based on my Marilyn Monroe vector drawing.