Silver Star

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