My Parisian Violets!

These beautiful violets I recently bought at Wal-Mart and they are so pretty. They really like the filtered light from my south facing window in my kitchen. I used my handy, dandy 60 mm Nikkor macro lens at F/4.8, 1/90 sec, and ISO 200. A Bower 0.5 x High Resolution Digital Lens with Macro was added to the lens. In Lightroom 4 I just followed my workflow in my blog How to Use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Lightroom 4 Quickly. I painted over the center of the flower using an Adjustment Brush set to a high sharpening and just a little Clarity. In Photoshop a Curves Adjustment Layer was used to selectively remove a shadow behind the front flower (see my Using Curves Adjustment Layers to Get Rid of Shadows and Highlights blog). Painted Textures Seafoam textures was added and just the flower lightly painted back using a white layer mask and painting in black. Next 2 Lil’ Owls Affetto Grunge Mosaic texture (see sidebar for website link) was added and the center painted out so only the darkened edges remained on most of the image. French Kiss’s Vintage French Brush No. 2 set -Dec 1924 was placed on the left side of the image and set to 89% opacity. A Layer Style was opened on this overlay layer. A dark Stroke set to 3 pixels inside was added, a Pattern Overlay using that wonderful default Photoshop pattern Bubbles was checked to add some variation in the text (I think this is the first time I have ever used it!), and an Outer Glow at 39% opacity was used. A Color Fill Adjustment Layer was clipped to the overlay and set to a light blue color. On the upper right French Kiss’s Vintage French Brush 1903 (same link as above) writing was applied and another Color Fill Adjustment Layer was clipped using the purple color from the flower. That was it! Lots of fun to do!…..Digital Lady Syd