Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2010!

Amanda "Smudge Painting" and "High Key Effect"

This nice baby child Amanda is a godchild of my daughter Fia.
I inspired to do a smudge painting in Photoshop  of her.

Nice coincidence was Davrodigital's "High Key Effect" tutorial, which pops up from iTunes just updated podcasts list. http://davro-digital.com/wp/?p=2051

Cross process effect

One thing I found a really hard to understand and get to look right was cross process effect. This was the first time I saw this effect and didn't actually know for sure what was the right look for it. First I tried doing it following Katrin Eismann's tips she's giving in the book Creative Digital Lightroom in chapter 8. By following her tips with her image everything went fine, but when I tried to do this effect using my own image, troubles began. Changing the image didn't help anything. Then started to google cross process images seeing what they should look like. The results were much more lighter, than Katrin's example image. I even found few action, which did this lighter style effect. While tweaking with this effect just adding a new curve I suddenly start to read presets list and there it was second in the list "Cross Process(RGB)".I'm not sure has it been in CS3 or is this new CS4 preset. So I'm ready to believe that Katrin's image was special kind and that's a new preset otherwise she would mention about it.  Let me know your opinion about this effect and the images I made. Which one of these do look right?


This first image do follow Katrin's Cross Process tutorial.

For this next image I downloaded an action from http://www.amateursnapper.com/photography/digital-cross-processing-in-photoshop.

The last fireman image is made by using Photoshop CS4 curves cross process preset.

This last image of this beautiful lady is also made by using Photoshop CS4 curves cross process preset.

Original image from http://www.pbase.com/mrchevy/ani

Member to member photoart challenges: http://www.innographx.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3516&start=90

50%gray dodge and burn tool layer, smudge, cross process effect.

Katja's Birthday Card!

Oh yes my friend has a birthday and I need to make a card. There were only one problem. The Inspiration. That's right. I have lost my inspiration. None of my old ideas sound good and nothing did look right. I need to find my inspiration again. I did search several forums and galleries for looking the ideas. Yes and I surely did found something. Fantastic gallery from Pr Rajan http://www.pbase.com/prrajan. After looking his galleries I love to make a collage too. I also happen to find a free image website. http://freerangestock.com/ and the main images for my next work. Last week I found wonderful website http://mediamilitia.com/, which do offer large collection of free textures and 3D renders. So that was the way this next image was created as a birthday card for my friend. Happy birthday Katja!