Lesson 10 Project - Part 1 by Kathy Adams

Done in Photoshop 6:

This is the original picture for part one; assignment steps 1-5, only resized so it won't take up too much room on web page or take forever to upload.


I took this picture today from my office window because the pink and blue in the clouds was

layered in a pretty way. I knew it would need a lot of editing because I thought I might like to make it into a watercolor type picture. I downloaded it from my storage disk.

The following is my usual workflow:

Evaluation & Tuning:

1.) check to see if picture is even worth working on; not obviously blurred or total trash

2.) check to see if it needs to be cropped or straightened

I cropped it

3.) click the "auto color" option to see what changes it will do automatically

4.) after doing this I usually work with the "adjust color, color variations" option because I like to see what will happen when I choose to add more of certain colors

Midtones: increase the reds about 33%

decreased the greens about 33%

Shadows: darken about 33%

Highlights: lighten about 33%

Saturation: 33% darker

5.) after doing these things, the picture looked a little "noisy" so I went to the noise reduction filter

Strength: 8

Preserve Details: 88%

Reduce color noise: 87%

Remove jpeg artifact

6.) after doing this I went to the "levels layer"

I used the slider to get these results: 17, 107 and 249 because it looked good to me.

Effects:

1.) Filter: Artistic Filter: Dry Brush

Brush Size: 1

Brush Detail: 10

Texture: 1

2.) after I did this I thought it would look better if I cropped it even more

3.) flattened image so the layers were all compressed together

4.) resized for e-mail and web page use from 1641 x 1159 to 820 x 579

5.) saved to external hard drive under "water colors"

This is the final result: