Lighter Handed

My wellness day on Thursday was wonderful.  I made jewelry all morning and then went to my knitting class where I practiced casting on and off.  Then, I went on to drawing class in the evening.  I didn't get around to cooking any meals, but I took the time to put a grocery list together for a few Cooking Light recipes and now I have the most yummy smells coming out of my kitchen!  I'm trying a baked root vegetable sort of thing with chicken.  We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, it's almost like I got to have another day of reprieve from anything "real world" again today and I love it.  I had to go through my photos and find something to draw.  Part of this class I'm in is designed to work us through a drawing from beginning to end.  I was completely overwhelmed with picking one thing that I will have to focus on for hours of work.  But, alas, I finally found a really pretty shot and worked it out.  I'll share more about that one as it goes in later posts.  For now, though, I want to share a few variations of a photo that I found while wandering through my files.  

This is a light from out at the Bedford Springs Resort in my hometown.  I took tons of shots during the course of a few visits last year and I want to use more of them.  I worked with this shot for my Kim Klassen layering adventures.  Some of her advice that I read this week was to be aware of having a heavy hand with adjustments and effects.  Well, I obviously didn't heed this advice for the banner, but I tried a "lighter touch" and here's what I have to offer...I wanted to share my latest PSE banner.  The "gradient map" is my new favorite tool.  Here's the new banner:

 And here's the original shot that they came from:

I'm happy it's the end of a Monday.  I got lots of good mail today, so I'll share later this week!

A New Banner

I don't normally stay up this late, but I forgot my sheets were in the washer so now I'm waiting until the final tumbles are done.  In the meantime, I'm having a little fun with PS Elements and trying to figure out how to get a pic sized right for a banner.  Normally I use Picnik and it's really easy to resize things.  This was a little more challenging, but I think I figured it out!

Here's the photo it started from:

And here's the end product:

You may ask yourself, "Why would Jen put a copy of the banner in the post when it's right there at the top of her page?"  Well, I'll answer by telling you that my mom is at least one of my fans and she sees my posts via a daily email, so she wouldn't know what kind of "banner" I was talking about unless I make it crystal clear.  haaaaaaaaaaaa


It looks a little squished, but I think it'll work for now.  I'm taking a Skinny-Mini photoshop course with Kim Klassen, so hopefully I can figure out the measurement stuff along the way.


Happy Friday!

How I Made My Banner...

I'm pretty tickled with how my latest banner came out and thought I'd share some of the steps I take through Picnik to play with my photos and make it work.  The fun thing about Picnik is you can spend hours and hours playing or just make a quick effect change to make drama easily.  Of course I didn't think to do this when I actually made the banner, so I went through the steps again.  I don't write down the color/percentage formulas so I can't necessarily recreate it exactly, but you'll get the gist.

1.  The original photo that I took with my Canon Rebel after making Curt pull off the side of the road while driving around Alexandria a few weeks ago.  It's not "tack sharp" by any means because of the combination of my handheld camera and the breeze, but I love the shot because of the horizontal focal branch.

2.  I really wanted to capture that horizontal branch, so I cropped the photo so the branch moved along the bottom third of the field (roughly) and left a nice space over on the right hand side for a text box.  The key for banners is to then resize the cropped pic to 968 pixels wide.

3.  Before moving into Picnik's different effects, I did a quick adjustment of the color saturation to get a little more brightness.  The sliding scale is perfect because you can move it back and forth until you get just what you like.  I wouldn't have noticed that salmon-pinkish sort of background without the adjustments.  

4.  Then I went for effects.  This is "Bunny Tone" which "posterized" the details and softened the colors but then I added a dash of "Boost" that brings out the color in their new tones.

5.  Next I went to the HSL filter...first is a "cool version" of the photo.  I love the purples and blues with the bright yellow flowers, but that's not the look I was really going for.

6.  Still in the HSL filer, I made a few adjustments to see what I could find and came up with this peachy version which is a perfectly pretty version, but I still wanted more energy.

7.  A few more adjustments and I found the colors I really wanted and then went back to edit the saturation levels to get this bright pink and orange with a little purple deep in the background:

8.  When doing a banner, there are lots of different ways to put the text in there, but I really like using a rectangle "sticker" to create a more level background for the letters so the font doesn't get lost in the photo.  This is the initial look of a sticker on the photo and it's obviously a bit of a big black vacuum that doesn't do much to enhance the look of the photo:

9.  Adjusting just the rectangle, I changed the color to a sort of chartreuse-y yellow and then made it semi-transparent.  I like the way that block balances with the focal flowers on the left-hand side.

10.  And, finally, I added some text.  There are lots of cool fonts to choose from, so it's always a challenge for me to pick.  I think this one is called Pepe.  I adjusted the color a bit and then used a filter to make it blend through the rectangle with the rest of the photo.

The last step for blogger is to go into the Design tab and add this photo into your header.  If you have it sized to 968 pixels, it'll fit right in there!  It seems like a whole lotta steps, but since each phase is such a fun experiment it doesn't seem to take all that long.  Go have a Picnik adventure for yourself!