Playing in Photoshop Again...

If I didn't have Photoshop my artistic life would be about zero. It isn't often that my hands do not shake to badly for me to draw like I once could so I use Photoshop to substitute for my pen and ink, oils or whatever I once used to create art.

These are just a few of the latest of my playing in PS.

I used a photo of a friend, a photo I took of a tree in a cemetery and lots of imagination in Photoshop to achieve the results you see.

If only I had had PS many years back when I would spend nights in a makeshift darkroom set up in my bathroom. Now in minutes I can achieve results I could only dream of back then. Even after working all night I would still not have the result I was looking for and go back the next night to try once again. I had to work in my darkroom late at night because any other time my four children and wife would for some strange reason need access to it. How unfair of them to expect me to share the one and only bathroom in our house. Oh, well some how it worked out and no one had any accidents.

The use of layers in Photoshop means you can combine several of them together to achieve results that are or can be mind blowing. At least to me they are mind blowing since to draw them out on paper or canvas would take days if not weeks and then not get the results I can in minutes within PS.

Some of the examples you see below are a combination of more than six layers. By just adding a layer you get a different look. In PS you merge the layers, copy them, then un-merge them so you can use one or more of the layers again with another combination. In this one work I have over fifty layers and can combine them in multiple ways to change the look of the final result. I can also copy and paste any layer into another work.

You can also use Paint Shop Pro or several other programs to do about the same thing as you can in Photoshop. I prefer PS because it is the program I started with nearly ten years back. It is expensive and has a steep learning curve but if you can afford it and have time to learn it has bells and whistles that most other programs do not have.

Enough of my ramblings...here are the six examples of what I did last night.