Day 3 - Kim Klassen's 12 Days of Textures

I took this picture at the Fort Worth Botanical Garden a couple of summers ago. I loved the way the flowering plant framed this Ruby-throated Hummingbird. I thought this would be a good candidate for Kim's new Cosmos texture. It really makes the silhouette of the bird stand out and it gives a feeling of air movement. The recipe:
1 layer of Kim's "Cosmos" texture using the Overlay blend mode at 100%
1 Layer of my own "Dirty Chalkboard" texture using the Soft Light blend mode at 100%

Day 2 - Kim Klassen's 12 Days of Textures

Day 2 of Kim Klassen's 12 Days of Textures features her new Anabelle texture. The recipe for my raspberry picture below is:
1 layer of Thursday in soft light blend mode at 100%
1 layer of Crackerjack in soft light blend mode at 91%
1 layer of Anabelle, converted to grey scale, inverted, screen blend mode at 100%

Day 1 - Kim Klassen's 12 Days of Textures

What an exciting idea! Starting today, Kim will be sharing a new texture each day for 12 days over at the Kim Klassen Cafe. Today's beautiful texture is "Lilly". Here I converted the texture to grey scale, inverted it, and applied a layer to my dragonfly shot in Screen Blend mode at 56% opacity for some dreamy musical edges.



Thank you Kim!

A Holiday Mood

Today will be a day of holiday decorating, shopping, baking cookies, and later visiting with friends. I love the hustle and bustle of the holiday season...especially when I am not stressing out about work.

I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful holiday season so far!



I processed this image using my Soft Grunge texture (shared over on my Flickr Site) and one of my new holiday textures, "Winter Wonderland". Check out my previous post if you are interested in downloading my freebie holiday textures.

Have a great Saturday!!

A Couple of Fun Winter Texture Freebies

I have a couple of new textures to share with you, "Let It Snow!" and "Winter Wonderland", which works well using a screen blend mode. I think these have some fun possibilities! Click the image below to go to the site where you can download these textures for free using the password "SiennaFreebie".



Have fun! :)

Celebrating the Beauty of Nature in Winter

This week's theme in Kim Klassen's Texture Tuesday is "Celebrate". Some of us are already experiencing winter...even though winter is still 2 weeks away. Winter brings a special beauty all of its own. Take a moment to notice those little winter birds flitting through the trees, and foraging on the ground, the beauty of the frost on the leaves or lingering flowers, the peaceful beauty of a snowy landscapes. Lets "celebrate" the beauty of nature in winter.

I processed this image using a very subtle layer of Kim Klassen's "KK_LovinLayers" texture, with a darken blend mode at 25% opacity to give a little atmosphere.




Happy Texture Tuesday! :)

Experimenting with RadLab

In Photo Art Friday, the theme is to work with a tool, method or style that we have been wanting to try. I have been seeing some buzz around about RadLab and I wanted to give it a try. I downloaded the free 30-day trial and discovered that the tool has a nice interface allowing you to see the results of different filters on your image, with different options on how to display the filter results. The tool has a nice plug-in for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, which allows you to add a RadLab layer, with your filter selections. You can set the opacity for your RadLab layer just like you can any layer. I was excited to see the number of filters you can choose from, some affect color, some affect sharpness, some are different variations of monochrome. It is similar in a way to the things you can do with Adobe Lightroom pre-sets. I'm not sure if you can create your own RadLab filters the way you can create your own Lightroom pre-sets, but I found it to be very powerful and convenient.

In my image below, I played around with several RadLab filters and topped it off with the Pixel Dust, "pdpa Linen Blind" texture. I LOVE this texture!! Thank you Bonnie for sharing it!