Alex has generously offered for writers and artists to use some of his free photos in your blog.

Free images for poets. Part Three. Abandoned Summer Houses. Twelve pictures

This is Alex Markovich’s photo. I love the textures, the clouds, the depth, and the light white on the foreground vegetation.

I’m learning how to use overlays to evoke a different drama or mood so I was playing around the picture.

So here, I added a Layer Mask of Color– Green, then invert the layer mask (control I), and painted over the area in the background I wanted to darken a bit. Then I added blue in the same way for the sky. When you invert, it takes the color away and then you brush it back on to the area where you want it. So for me, it was the sky. I added sun rays also to give it some drama.

With the layer mask, you can change it to different kinds of blending modes–Overlay, Soft Light, Multiply, Darken. I usually switch around to see which works best for me. Then you can also change the opacity, and if one is too dark, you can lighten.

But you have to have a story, right? It was transitioning from winter to spring in the picture above, the flowers just appearing in white blossoms in the foreground, the trees and shrubs in the background just lightly green.

But then autumn came all of a sudden and turned all the spring colors into fall.

I can turn off and on changes I have made so that I can see what the picture looks like without some of the changes.

This was with no green on the background. Notice with a little darker background, like in Alex’s original photo, it gives it more depth.

When I cut out the blue layer I had added to the sky, it makes the picture appear more vintage.

But then fall storms began to darken the sky…

Here, I removed the sun’s rays. The sun’s rays that I have actually has a darker background, so it darkens the whole picture, which is why adding the sun’s rays in the others shows more darkened tree or shrubs in the foreground than in the one with no sun’s rays. I can brush out the darkness, but I liked it like it was, giving more detail to the textures in the foreground. It’s just a matter of preference.

A light and cheery day. But then…spring came in all of a sudden, greening the background, and showing the power of the flowers in the foreground.

I loved the hint of white on Alex’s shrubs/trees out front though, and I love green, so I kept trying to turn the picture more green. And here you have it. Change the Color balance to more cyan, and blue, and then I had my greens and whites. 🙂 And I like the blue-green skies, though you can tone them down to make them look more pastel blue. 🙂

And that’s my fun for the morning. Off to finish bears and my word count!

Have a colorful day! 🙂

Terry

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”

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