10/28/2015 - Pickles At The Picnic

The Daily Texture for 10/28/2015
​Pickles At The Picnic

Today's Daily Texture is filled with some luscious pastels, and accented with a rich, olive pickle green.  I paired this texture with a still life photo I took several years ago.  Now...I am NOT a still life photographer.  I don't have the appropriate studio lighting to photograph still life indoors and usually if I photograph objects, I do so outdoors in natural light.  But for some reason on the day I took this photo, I tried it indoors.  I can't even begin to tell you how horrible this set of photos turned out!  The "pose" of the rose in the various places I put it is fine...it's the darkness and graininess of the photos which stink.

Because of the low light, my white background turned out gray.  I seriously didn't think I was going to be able to do anything with this, and was fully intending on masking away that entire gray background.  I placed the photo on top of the texture, and just started playing with layer modes.  To my surprise, when I clicked on the hard light layer mode, the gray background almost completely disappeared!  I just had to mask away the edges, plus I masked away a little more of the image, such as the end of the stem on the flower, to make it blend better with the background.  Everything was looking pretty good at that point, but that grain in the photo was still horrid.

Just on a hunch, I opened the Topaz module "Topaz Clean".  I've never really messed with this module, but I decided to see what it would do.  There's a couple of different choices in there, some which create some pretty odd results.  I ended up choosing "Flat Style", which turned my rose and teacup into a sort of computerized watercolor look.  I noticed the strength was all the way up on #7.  I took that down to a #2, and I REALLY liked the result.  I brought it down to #1, which ended up still showing some grain in the darker part of the flower.  So I moved it back to #2 strength.  After merging the two layers, I brightened the overall image just a little.  I'll have to remember this Topaz Clean feature again...as I have a LOT of photos with heavy grain from times past, and using this feature in the software definitely helps to remove it and create a pleasant image!

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