Flower Friday: Alstroemeria

Blipper Rainie has been doing some fabulous mirror-box effects in Photoshop recently so I decided to have a go - after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Firstly, I needed some flowers. There's not many in the garden at present, but it's a while since I bought my Editor some flowers so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. They had some nice alstroemeria at the local supermarket (yes, of course she she knows why I chose today to buy them!).

Then, how to get a nice background? I thought a photo in front of the window at night might work - but no, the black background didn't work well at all. So I had to paste the flower photo onto a textured background I'd saved previously. That took a while (and if you look carefully it's not a perfect job).

Then - how to get the effect? Happily Professor Google led me to an excellent Youtube video from Gavin Hoey (here).

It all went fairly well thereafter. Except that Adobe, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to make the "Free Transform" tool in Photoshop 2019 default to proportional scaling of images...you have to hold down "Shift" to change the size in only one dimension. That was different from the older version of Photoshop used in the Youtube video. (Google helped again there, phew!).

So here's the result. I'm supposed to be contributing to a Photoshop training session at camera Club in November so now I have a technique to demonstrate. Many thanks to Rainie - although my attempt here isn't nearly as good as hers so I'll have to try again sometime.

And (of course) many thanks as always to BikerBear Anni for hosting Flower Friday.

PS Added to Hobbs's colour challenge too - thanks Hobbs.