Anything Photoshop or Photography

Latest

Palm Cockatoo Looking at You

Image of a Palm Cocatoo at the Jacksonville Zoo

This interesting Palm Cockatoo‘s image was taken at the St. Augustine Zoological Farm in Florida. (The difference between the Cockatoo and the Cockatiel is linked here.) In Lightroom, used the Background: Soften preset from Mark Dumbleton really nice set called MD Presets – Lightroom Tools V1.3 on the background. Downloaded (check out his Full Photo Edit Using My Free Lightroom Presets YouTube Video for link) them recently and I really like them. Then just followed a few of Matt Kloskowski’s instructions from his YouTube The Photoshop Technique You Didn’t Know Your Wanted. Enjoyed putting a texture behind this bird – used Soulful Sea Breeze from Jai Johnson (cannot find on her site) set to Linear blend mode. One little trick I have found useful is if there are just a few smallish areas that need to be sharpened or softened, just use the Sharpen Tool (and if it turns the area to an ugly color, set the layer to Luminosity blend mode to remove the color) and the Blur Tool – just adjust the Strength. Lots of fun!…..Digital Lady Syd

02/20/2026 | Categories: Textures | Leave A Comment »

Considering

Portrait drawing - no AI

This drawing was a lot of fun to do – it has been a while since I created one from scratch and no AI was used. I am trying to stay away from this as much as possible right now. All Photoshop brushes were used and many were adjusted to get the effect I wanted. As learned by doing my selfie series, one of my favorite brushes is a Chalk Brush with a heavy texture added in the texture settings. The original image used a Legacy Chalk brush with a texture taken from the legacy Crayon Brush (see my Just Drawing and Painting in Photoshop Fun Photoshop Blog – at bottom go to Adding Texture to Your Brush Information section on how to do this.) Used David Belliveau’s Paintable free brush download of Portrait Brushes (Textured brush 02). Created the collar and jewelry from Jessica Johnson‘s Chain Brushes set and her Luxe-Gold Leopard Exclusive brushes set to Mixer and sampling a gold texture. Need to sign up for her newsletter to learn this technique ,and she often sends out free brushes to try. These were Christmas give-aways from a couple years ago. Stacked a couple 2 Little Owls old textures from years ago. Hope you enjoy her thoughtful expression…..Digital Lady Syd

01/16/2026 | Categories: Drawings | Tags: , , | Leave A Comment »

Silver Star

B&W - or silver Christmas Star glitter ornament

This image of a silver Christmas Ornament was originally very out of focus (even after using Topaz Sharpen) with a lot of background distractions. I decided to give the image more of an outdoor night feel, but only after spending a lot of time trying to get it to look good in color. 14 different mainly snow type brushes were used. One of my tricks to keeping the brushes straight is to create a new group in the Brushes Panel and name it for the image, in this case Christmas Silver Star. Then the brushes being used are dragged into the new group (don’t save their original groups, just delete them and reload later if needed). If a brush’s settings are changed, need to create a New Brush and drag it into the Star group. This way you can get back to them very quickly. On a New Layer a Pattern Stamp Scatter Brush (with a turquoise glitter pattern) was used to get the foreground effect and on a separate layer, and with the same brush an evergreen pattern was painted where the tree color would be in the background. Good start but not near enough. (Here is a link for Free Glitter Patterns & Styles that should help you out here – once loaded into the Patterns Panel, they can be added to the Pattern Stamp brush by clicking on the drop-down Pattern Picker arrow in the Options Bar.) Selecting the Star, a silver glitter Pattern Stamp brush added more glitter to it. A regular fog brush was used to fill in the mid-area behind the star. A Smudge Tool set to 76% Strength was used to get rid of any distractions that were still apparent. A greenery regular brush was used to stamp down some edge branch effects. The bottom left was larger branches Set to Overlay blend more with bits of snow added to the tips of the branches. A Magic Dust brush by Pretty Actions added the snow effect. Last step involved converting to black and white with Silver Efex Pro – lots of tweaking to get it just right, but that was it. Took a pretty bad image and converted it into something rather fancy!…..Digital Lady Syd

01/10/2026 | Categories: Photoshop Painting, Photoshop Tips | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Big Bird

Image of a Yellow Billed Stork or Mycteria Ibis

Tried out a new tutorial on this fabulous Yellow Billed Stork image at the Jacksonville Zoo. He is hard to miss if you get into their bird section! Most of this image was post-processed using a very short YouTube tutorial called The Ultimate Masking Trick to Recreate Lighting Realistically in Camera Raw by Easy Photoshop. I did start in Lightroom to do some basic steps like selecting the Adaptive: Subject: Warm Pop preset, the Profile (using Camera Standard v4 for Nikon camera), setting Sharpening to 0, checking Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections, and lastly running Denoise and adjusting the slider amount. In Photoshop Topaz Sharpen AI was applied, then duplicated this layer and ran Gaussian Blur (Radius 2.5) on the whole layer. For layer selected what should not be blurred by using Object Selection and adding the foreground plants using the Selection tool for one big selection of bird and foreground areas. By adding a layer mask to the blurred image layer, the part not to be blurred was created. Next a stamped layer was created and turned into a Smart Object. Now the image was ready for the tutorial so the Camera Raw Filter was opened. This is where most of the lighting effect took place using the Masking section. It was actually pretty easy if you follow the tutorial steps. I really like the very nice soft warm effect on the bird neck and the background. Could not have done this before this year…… Digital Lady Syd

12/07/2025 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Lady at the beach

AI generated and digitally painted by me image of a young lady at the beach

Was not sure what to name the image – Lady at the beach or Feeling Breezy. Generated this image in PS using Adobe Firefly back in 2024. As you can see, it is pretty basic from what Firefly does a year later, but I still liked the overall feel of the generation. There was a lot of manipulation done to the image after it was created. Many layers of painted areas using different brushes. One thing that was selected was an old legacy filter from Topaz called Lens Effects – it created a rather soft lovely yellow vignette around the image. I just downloaded this nice font from Creative Market called Bellisa Script – it has many glyph choices which makes it fun. At least it feels like I put a bit of myself into the image…..Digital Lady Syd

12/05/2025 | Categories: AI, Generative AI, Just Being Creative, Photoshop Painting | Tags: , | Leave A Comment »

Checking his World

Image of a Rainbow Lorikeet bird

Had some fun doing creating this Rainbow Lorikeet parrot image. Once again, Matt Kloskowski has created a YouTube video called The Photoshop Technique You Didn’t Know Your Needed on blending textures with subjects. Love Matt’s tutorials as they are always very informative and not rushed at all. Already had a really nice bird image taken at the Jacksonville Zoo.

In Photoshop duplicated the background layer with the bird and then selected the bird. Added a layer mask – the bird appears in white in the mask. Replaced the bottom bird background layer with Jai Johnson Soulful Sea Breeze texture bought in 2015 (could not find it now) – her textures are great for wildlife photos. Then added on top her older freebie Wispy Clouds 2 set to Hard Light blend mode at 61% layer opacity – this brightened up the whole image. A layer mask was added and the corners were painted out slightly where it did not look right. On top of this texture another Soulful Sea Breeze texture was set to Soft Light to add strength to the colors – in a layer mask painted with black where it was too strong around the bird’s head. Selected the bird layer on top and blended the edges in using a very soft round brush set to a Flow of 10% very softly building up a nice effect. Last steps were: a stamped layer (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) for use with the Camera Raw filter where Texture and a new Profile were added; back in PS an Exposure Adjustment Layer was used to sharpen the eye a little bit; and a Vignette was created using a Curves Adjustment Layer set to Multiply – dragged down the top right side to 50 to make a darker image – just paint a large black circle in the layer mask with a very big soft round brush and set the layer opacity to 30%. The blending takes a little time but overall it was a lot fun…..Digital Lady Syd

10/10/2025 | Categories: Just Being Creative, Textures | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Gigantic Wave

AI generated and personally painted over image of a large surfing wave

I created this image while working on my Fun Photoshop Blog called Mixing It Up with Legacy Bristle Brushes in Photoshop-Mixer Refresher. The initial wave was created using the an AI prompt “Large wave for surfing” in Photoshop. Ended up flipping it, changing the color of it, and adding the Mixer bristle brush strokes on top of it. Most of the brushes used here were created by Fay Sirkis (brushes are no long available except on Kelby One). In the image above the beautiful blender strokes that were created for the wave are quite noticeable. And the foreground utilized some very small regular Mixer brushes that added color for the details. In other words, just by looking at many of the provided Photoshop bristle brushes, the paint strokes for the image could be figured out. Tips on how to work with these brushes are in the referenced blog. It was a lot of fun to see if I could get that frothy look into the top of the wave. ….. Digital Lady Syd

09/02/2025 | Categories: AI, Generative AI, Just Being Creative, Photoshop Painting | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

More Adobe Photoshop Firefly AI Fun!

AI image of a lady in the tropics

Practicing using Adobe Firefly AI so that it does not overrun my creative expression. Image was created by drawing the lady’s head on a layer using a David Belliveau curly hair brush and one of Grut‘s pencil brushes for the skin and details on the face. Duplicated this layer and turned off the original for backup. On this layer the Contextual Taskbar was used to Generate the rest of the image using the prompt “Watercolor background of beach and add female body to woman” showing different poses with a white bathing suit on the body connected to her head. Pretty cool! The chosen variation was turned into a new layer (see my Fun Photoshop Blog called Placing Any Photoshop Generative Fill Variation on a Layer Easily to do this) and the other variations layer was turned off in case other parts would be needed later. Placed a New Layer under the newly created body variation layer (turned off at this point), a different AI background was generated the same way using the prompt: “Beach background in watercolor with pastel colors.” After selecting this new background variation and turning it into a regular layer, the original body AI layer was turned on above. With a layer mask, its background was painted out where not needed.

Painting Details: On separate layers, the face drawing was painted like I do with my Selfie AI images. The highlights and shadows on the body were created using Sam Peterson’s technique. (See my Fun Photoshop A Few Photoshop and Lightroom Tips and Tricks Blog-see #2 for this.) The skirt effect was created by following Carol Tayler’s Silk Texture short video for net brush settings, and the gold Scatter Brush added on top of the skirt was from Jessica Johnson’s video Creating Custom Photoshop Pattern Brushes (and Layer Styles) Inspired by High Couture: Rahul Mishra Muse on Behance. Lots of clean up especially on the body and several Adjustment Layers were added at this point – AI still is not perfect in Photoshop! Though I did enjoy trying out a different way to use it …..Digital Lady Syd

08/09/2025 | Categories: AI, Generative AI, Just Being Creative, Photoshop Painting | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Native American Woman

AI generated sketch by Grok 3 and digitally painted by me

Just had a lot of fun getting back to digitally painting portraits. Tried out the Grok 3 AI image generator and used as a prompt “Sketch of a Native American Portrait of a Younger Woman with jewelry.” Not exactly sure what kind of hocus-pocus occurred, but I was able to get a sketch somewhat similar to the one above. Lots was changed, and I noticed the exact facial proportions are not totally perfect, but overall it is a very pleasing image. Two backgrounds were used – one was my own Jaguar Texture and the other one was Melissa Gallo’s Summer Silk texture (not sure it is still available). Wanted an overall warm feeling to the image so the textures provided this. All the brushes used were ones discussed in numerous AI portrait images I painted in other blog entries – just in this and my Fun Photoshop Blog for more on this. Only the earrings and necklace had one of Jessica Johnson‘s lovely gold Pattern Stamp Brushes called Gold Leopard Exclusive from one of her Luxe sets. I decided I wanted the hair to look a little unkempt instead of perfect like a model. …… Digital Lady Syd

07/18/2025 | Categories: AI, Photoshop Painting | Tags: , , | Leave A Comment »

The Rose

Image of a pink rose

Just one of the beautiful blooms in my recent Mother’s Day flowers. Major filter applied to the image was the wonderful, but now defunct, Lucis Pro. Always gives a unique feeling to images. Also painted using my SJ Pastel 3 brush (that I have used for years – see How to Create my Favorite Brush for settings if you are interested.) Also used a Smudge Brush created a long time ago after watching Robert Ardell watercolor videos. The settings I used are very simple: Small soft round brush like 16 pixels, Spacing 25%, and in Options Bar set Strength to 81% – adjust to fit what you need. I usually have Sample All Layers checked also. It is a very handy Smudge Brush for small places. Robert’s older YouTube videos are still really good – see Watercolor Painting In Photoshop – Blenders and Erasers – Video 5 where he discusses the Smudge Brush. The last step added a Color Lookup Adjustment Layer set to 49% layer opacity (used an On1-Summertime1). That was it and no AI needed! Refreshing that a flower can be beautiful without having to fake it!…..Digital Lady Syd

05/26/2025 | Categories: Macro, Photoshop Filters, Photoshop Tools | Tags: , | Leave A Comment »

« Older Entries