Not part of the course, but I thought I'd try those magazine tutorials....

I seem to buy a lot of photography magazines,  pouring over their photographs, reading articles pro's and what they are doing atm and invariably putting their tutorials to the side with the good intention of trying them out one day... no more. that day has come. So instead of working thru' the coursework this evening, I've decided to buckle down and give those tuts a go.. I'll even use their photographs!

 

First off was the supersampler... it's worked but because I decided to add a border to it it embossed the the dividing lines too. Not sure I'm that keen on the embossing effect!

start image

Final image

 Next I tried an antiquing effect which I must say was quite time consuming and probably needs a bit more practice but, I think that overall it was a good result turning a modern crisp digital image into something a little more romantic and  a little less hard on the eyes. I love it. I had tried different effects before using my own techniques but that left the images always looking a little washed out and indistinct. This is definitely a technique I will use again.  So I'll set out the main points of how it was done but you can also find the tutorial in the May 2011 issue of Photoplus (Canon Edition) magazine:

1.  Create a border  using layers and resizing the canvass to 110%
2. Rough up the border again using the layers palette and selecting the brush tool (Hard Pastel on Canvas) setting size to about 60px- blur it using the Gaussian Blur effect
3. Increase the contrast by creating a monochrome layer and using levels set white highlight to about 215 and black shadow slider to about 30
4. Create diffuse highlights by setting the monochrome layer's blending mode to luminosity and setting opacity at around 40%
5. Then desaturated the yellows to -55 from the image to give the photo a colder feel and then desaturate the master saturation down to about -35
6. To create a light leakage effect (and i struggled a bit with this one) you create a new layer  and selecting that layer with the background copy. using brush tool select the foreground colour to orange and paint over the edges bringing opacity down to about 57%
7. finally use a vignetting effect to focus the attention n the boat.