Butterfly Beauty!
Today I had a chance to get some wonderful shots of one of the beautiful butterflies that are flying all around my neighborhood. This is a female Palamedes Swallowtail Butterfly and she is loving the pink pentas in my front yard (the males are smaller and more black in color). I was so surprised that she stayed around while I shot several pictures. The trick to getting the shot since her wings are flapping like crazy – set your ISO to 1600 and shot at F11 and higher. I was able to get many very clear shots. Three textures were applied using Russell Brown’s Paper Texture Panel: ShadowHouse Creations Scratched Overlay set to Hard Light blend mode at 100% layer opacity and Softly Blurred Edges set to Overlayat 100% opacity (see sidebar for website link), and Gavin Hoey’s Grunge Border set to Overlay at 100%. All had layer mask applied and the butterfly was painted out completely using a black brush in the mask. A Curves Adjustment Layer was created to adjust just the blue channel curve to bring out her blue spots, then the mask was filled with black (with white Foreground color, CTRL+BACKSPACE to fill with mask with black). Just painted back in the blue dots in the Curves Layer Mask with a white brush. That is all that was done to the image – what a showgirl!……Digital Lady Syd
Digital Lady Syd’s Related Blogs:
Digital Lady Syd’s Rule No. 5: Just Step Outside and Look Around!
Another Soft Hawaiian Landscape
Image was taken at Lapakahi Historical State Park of one of the homes the early Hawaiians lived in roughly 600 years ago on the western side of the Big Island.
For this image, the steps used were from my my blog Using Color Efex Pro and Texture for a Warm Hawaiian Landscape Effect for the second image. Same Lightroom preset, same textures (using Russell Brown’s Texture Panel (see my blog Russell Brown’s Paper Texture Panel Updated!), and same adjustment layers. Image was sharpened and a New Layer was added on top where a paint brush set to yellow at 20% opacity was used to paint in the blown out highlights on the roof of the house. (See my blog Getting Rid of Those Blown Out Areas in Your Image on how to do this.) A different OnOne PhotoFrame was added – Taufer_Texture_12. (See sidebar for website link.)
Not very realistic but definitely has that Hawaiian feel and that is okay!…..Digital Lady Syd
