Patched

I spent until early afternoon at work today. It went well and I have a new site to develop next week. I'm looking forward to it.

On the way home I treated myself a quick stop off in the High St area, one my favourite blip hang outs. Sure enough within a couple of minutes I was done :-)

A few of you have asked me about my Photoshop recipe. Like most of my cooking it's a bit vague but here goes. If you don't use Photoshop (or layers) I'm sure you can adapt the ideas.

Where I can I prefer to work with adjustment layers (under the layer menu). While you can do the same things from the image menu the advantage of layers is you're not altering pixels and can go back and tweak.

Adjustment layers I commonly use are brightness/contrast, curves (particularly the cross process option from drop down menu), black and white, hue/saturation (tick colorise box if I'm using black and white then alter slider until I have the tone I want) and sometimes photo filter or levels.

I don't always make the adjustment layer 100% opacity (for example try reducing black and white or curves opacity).

It's worth experimenting with blending modes too. I don't always use them and if I do I apply a blending mode to one of my layers, not the original image. Today the brightness/contrast adjustment layer was set to 'screen' blending mode.

Sometimes I copy the origninal image layer so I have two. The top one I'll apply a gaussian blur to, then add a mask and using either the eraser or brush tool, bring the subject into focus. If I've blown out hightlights and what not it's a quick job.

Stuff left a comment explaining how she uses Picasa (free download) to achieve her amazing blip photos. You don't need Photoshop, just a sense of adventure with whatever you're using. It's always a good idea to back up your image if you don't use layers.

Hope this stirs the creative juices. I just seem to be in a phase where I want to do images like this. I'd be interested to know what you do.

Yay, the weekend. I will continue to look after myself.