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Some Of My Images Used As Book Covers - before and after Part 2

 Book Covers - Before and After Part 2 Some time ago I created a post showing some of my images used as covers for books.  I am always curious how my wok is used, sometimes I am disappointed, but most of the time it is a pleasure to see the designs and the usage. So here we go: In these cases my original image hasn't been changed that much, most of the time only a crop and of course title and author.  Sometimes it is hard to make out my own design as you can see in this image:  My images are available for licensing through my agencies Trevillionimages   and   Arcangel Images or find something on my home page. Thanks very much. Dirk

Frosty Morning - Selective Texturizing

Hello,

today I have chosen a photo of a very frosty and cold winter morning from last year. It is a suitable example of how I texturize my pictures these days. I more & more use Photoshop's opportunities to selectively apply my textures using layer masks, different blending modes and gradients.  To keep it simple and for you to better follow what I have done, I have limited myself to essentially three easy techniques in this photo (usually it is a lot more work....)

The final result:

Frosty Morning

Creating a Vertorama

To create this view I stitched these two pictures in Photoshop and created a vertorama. Here are the two photos before I combined them in PS:



FM 1
FM 2

The vertical panorama that was the start for my further processing looked like this:


What I really like about stitching photos is, that you get a very large photo to work with. This is about 25 mp large!


Processing with Textures

There is no colour to speak of (and this is not a b&w conversion!) and the sky was just plain white or the clouds were not discernible. So I wanted to add some structure to the sky. Browsing through my texture files I came across my Light Grunge texture that I wanted to have for the sky:


Light Grunge




I selected only the sky and the bright parts of the tree tops and erased the rest of the texture to get some structure to the featureless white sky.

Next I chose my "overcast" texture, because I hoped to brighten the middle part of the picture, especially the trees and the bushes.
Overcast
As this texture provides a vignette ( a brighter middle) I was satisfied with the effect it had by using only a blending mode (overlay). I didn't have to erase any parts of the texture - so sometimes selective texturizing can be achieved simply by chosing the right blending mode and texture.

But the picture still looked a bit dull to me and I wanted to have some cold blue/green hues as well as a subtle vignette. Instead of adding a colour gradient I thought of achieving this by using a texture. My eye fell on another one from my texture pack:

paper & stone

Tone & texture seemed perfect for a vignette.  So dragged it on to my picture and added a layer mask. I chose a soft brush and erased (painted away) the middle of the texture. (Please take a look at the layers)

Next I had to balance the green tone of the whole photo and added a colour layer. Finally I enhanced the contrast a bit and the picture was almost done. I couldn't resist to add two birds using brushes. Once again I am indebted to the brushes that Shadow House Creations provides:

Bird Brushes

Please check the copy of the layers to see how I blended everything and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me.

Layers Frosty Morning



As mentioned before, the textures I have used are part of my Build your own texture pack .

Thanks for reading!


Comments

  1. this blog is just great! thank you so much!

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  2. I have never heard the word vertorama! Wonderful tutorial!

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