11/04/2015 - Rainy Fall Day

The Daily Texture for 11/04/2015
​Rainy Fall Day

I absolutely LOVE Today's Daily Texture!  Who ever thought RAIN could be so inspiring?  It certainly was with this one.  I used this texture to pair with a photo of a Nuthatch.  

First, I placed the photo on top of the texture and blended away her background, slightly leaving a little of the tree trunk she was perched on visible.  Then I went back to the base texture layer and duplicated it, setting it on multiply at about 50%.  This darkened things a bit, which is what I wanted, especially at the bottom.  Then I duplicated the texture layer again, and placed this one on top of the bird, setting it to soft light at 100%.  I masked a little of this layer off the bird, but left it over the background.  The I duplicated that layer again, and set it to soft light at 50%, which darkened things around the edges a bit more and gave a nice glow of light around her head.

At this point, I merged everything, and I could have stopped there.  But the bird photo was a bit more noisy than I liked, especially in comparison with the texture.  I suffer with this noise issue a lot with my birds, because I usually shoot them at a higher ISO to be able to capture their movement without blurring.  I had denoised the photo before I worked with it, but it still wasn't enough for my liking.

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So...I ended up taking the merged image into Corel Painter 16.  Using the original photo as my clone source, I painted JUST THE BIRD.  I left the texture alone, as it was already beautiful.  But by painting the bird, it eliminated all of the noise, and gave her a smooth, painterly look which worked well with the textured background.