Entry 07: Jeanilee, a sunflower and photoshop

Jeanilee is my girl!  She is just too cool to photograph.  Jeanilee is a good old fashioned hard working American, a university student close to graduating and an ass kicking mixed martial arts fighter.  Better be careful around this woman and do not let her diminutive size fool you – she will mess you up.  This photo is from our second shoot together.  It is a natural, casual shot we took on a Friday afternoon.  We took a lot of them too but I wanted to share what I did with Adobe’s Photoshop (CS5) on this photo.

I made lithograph out of this shot.  I opened the photo in Photoshop then made a layer copy of the initial photo (background).  I do that because it is better not to work on the original just in case you mess something up.  While on my copied layer, I went to image pull down menu then clicked on adjustments then threshold.  POW, you have a lithograph.

Look at the Texas Sunflower photo I took back in the summer of 2008, in Texas, as a lithograph but inverted.  It looks like a negative.  All you do is the same series of menus but then do it again after it is a lithograph but instead of clicking threshold you click invert - cool.

Here Jeanilee’s photo is converted into an almost ghost like appearance with the “diffused glow” filter.  Same deal as before, you need a new layer of the photo then to the filter pull down menu.  Take it down to distort then click diffused glow and you have it.  Let us look at it with the sunflower.

Here the sunflower is using the same filter and it too has that ghost-land like look about it.  Maybe surreal is a better word but it is a cool affect.  The sunflower is just to show you the difference with a person versus an object.

The last one is another under the filter pull down menu.  This filter is the one called cutout.  Under the filter heading, you click on artistic then cutout and you get this computer graphic drawing look.  I like this filter a lot for its graphic fantasy like look and feel.

The same filter on the sunflower gives it a graphic arts dynamic that cannot be shaken.  This print is now ready for a canvas and a venue.  Just the same, I like the two photos as I originally took them. 

I just wanted to highlight how easy Photoshop can be.  I used all the default settings and nothing was tweaked.  Photoshop, of course, can do some very advanced function and everything in between.  I will show a few more tools of Photoshop on another post but this post was just too hi-light that, as advanced as the program is, Photoshop can do some real basic stuff too.  And it’s fun.

And here is the original photo of the sunflower.