Saturday 22 January 2011

It started with some flowers ...

You know that expression which says: "Today is the first day of the rest of your life"? Well, I feel this very strongly today as I write the first post for Quilliance Year Two!

I mentioned yesterday how excited I am about the creative potential that I'm discovering in Photoshop Elements - especially the facilities for adding special effects to photographs. By clicking around in the Filters menu, I've discovered all sorts of exciting visual effects, including one which transforms a photo into segments like a stained glass window. I think it works best on pictures which contain tiny details of contrasting colours, like these flowers which I photographed on the wonderful island of Herm last year:


If you look closely, you can see tiny pin-points of colour dotted around the dark blue centres of the flowers.  And just look at what happens when you add the stained glass effect in Photoshop:


I was so pleased with this, that I felt compelled to use it as a background for a new quilled card - and here it is, complete with a quilled butterfly whose wing colours are intended to echo those little details which have been individually highlighted in the stained glass segments. The second photo shows them best of all.



To everyone who so kindly commented on my Blogoversary post yesterday: thank you all so much! Your comments mean a great deal to me, and your blogs are an inspiration too. I look forward to lots more shared creativity in the year ahead ...

2 comments:

  1. I remember the thrill of discovering all that cool stuff when I was first learning photoshop elements. It is amazing what you can do to a picture. The best part is that even if you have a less than perfect picture you can still save it by doing some playing around.
    I love the card the butterfly looks great against the stained glass flowers.

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  2. Thanks Ann. You're right about all the 'cool stuff' in PSE - it's very addictive! And you're right about being able to save imperfect pictures, too - I love it!

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