Happy Lily

This white lily just appeared in my front yard last summer – I had planted this variety several years ago. I was excited to see it but the white color did not lend itself to great photo shots. I decided to give it a digital touch Here are some tips I had for this image:

1. Had to use a special brush I made to get rid of some of the color from chromatic aberration in the white lily petals – created a clone brush set to Color blend mode at 32% opacity to paint over those areas very lightly with a small 15 pixel brush. Brush called SJ Remove Chrom Abb around color edges. Only used where there is white or light color on the subject, now on the long edge and side of the petals which were way too soft. Used a regular soft cloning brush here.
2. Did not like the line definition of the petals so decided to use a new brush I created from Kyle’s Spatter Video – named it SJ Drawing Br-Airbrush – very small 3 pixels but very nice for this type of line drawing on flowers.
3. To get a more interesting effect, on the line drawing I opened the Layer Style – Glow and set it to Opacity 16%, Color a dark blue or #2d354e, Spread 41% and Size 32 to get a rather interesting shadow effect around the lines and gives a bit of a painterly effect to the whole image. This definitely turned out really good.
4. Used the Pattern Stamp Tool to created the pretty flowers on the ground – Used Jessica Johnson’s English Garden brush and pattern – in this case used one with the blues and purples in it. (Brush 11 at 200 pixel and Pattern 14) The brush had too much texture in it but when I turned it off, it did not look as good when repainted. Therefore I added a slight Gaussian Blur to the layer and set the Radius to 1.4 to remove the texture quality but still maintain the detail in the flowers.
5. Used Grut P Limbo Lift brush in his Pencil set to add shadow and highlights and his S Tend Octo brush to add the green and white small flower look.
6. The Bokeh Texture was from Jill Wellington from a long time ago and was set to Color Burn blend mode. Added a layer mask and painted out the flower.

That is basically what was done. It is fun to try new things!…..Digital Lady Syd