As we know blends or tattooing, as Rangefinder puts it, have become very popular in senior portrait photography. I've been giving it a whirl lately.

This was done for a challenge on another board I belong to. We were to go out and take shots of interesting textures and incorporate them into an image. This was a really fun exercise.

And I love it when happy accidents happen. The cool radiant look happened because I hit the wrong blur mode accidentally and LOVED the way it looked! I was going to do a surface blur but liked the radial blur so much better. I just moved it and centered it on his face. This has a TON of different layers and I changed opacities, layer blend modes and masked here and there. Not sure I could actually duplicate it, but I might come close. The bark was used in a color blend mode that showed some texture but mostly color. I like how it warmed it all up. Plus I used the sponge tool to saturate some areas. FUN FUN FUN!!



Original image:


Just wanted to encourage you all to go out, take some textural photos and then come home and have fun layering and blending and masking and...well you get the point! This stuff is truly a blast!

Let me know what you think!

On a technical note, I started out with the cooler toned cross-processed look as my original because I knew I was going to use some color blending modes to make it warmer and if I'd started off with the true color shot, the skin tones would have gone very red because he had a bit of a sunburn. So starting with the cooler tones really worked well and allowed me to play a bit before creating Lobster Boy.

These are the textures I used. Click on each one to see it larger:

I like what you have done. The photo looks totally different from the original. Keep on playing around,you never know what you can come up with.

Very cool stuff!

Twila,
This ROCKS! Seriously though this is super cool.


Cris...