About the Image(s)

We were wandering around a small woodland park in Tennessee, when we came upon these delightful carved fairy habitats in the woods. This is what I have done with one of them.

Original 2

I wanted to make the background more abstract. In Photoshop, I selected the subject in Original 1, refined it, and then inverted the selection. I added a grunge texture, then a Topaz Texture: Hard Days Night. As I do with most of my Topaz effects, I played with, and then altered the options. That helped but still didn’t tone down the background, so I added one of my own golden textures to the selected background, and then merged up to rejoin the subject and the background treatments.

Next, I overlayed an image of bark that I had taken. That significantly darked the entire image. After that, I used Topaz Impressions to give the image a Van Gogh effect. That ended up far too dark, so I upped the overall exposure with an Exposure adjustment layer, followed by a Selective Color adjustment layer, to remove some of the yellow on the fairy house. The saved image is Original 2.

I had recently purchased some new Artistry Effects from Photography BB, and I wanted to play with them. I opened the Renaissance-PORTRAIT effect in PS and then clicked File> Place Embedded, to open and save Original 2 in the Renaissance effect. Within the effect’s options, I enhanced the contrast and changed to Mood color. I also played with several other options, but do not remember which!

Finally, I applied an Exposure adjustment layer on top of all the other layers, and lighted the exposer. To that layer, I added a mask, and painted with various intensities of black to bring out shading and darkening from the subject in the darker underlying layers.