Theme: Not yet picnic time

[Nancy Bell]

I photographed this in Winter Park, CO, a place we go with the grandkids during the winter to ski, tube, etc. Always lots of fun! But I've never been there in the summer :Whoa!:.

Topaz Simplify 4 painting harsh color @ 50%, bkgd texture white glitter paper by tyuki with reduced opacity, a blended layer of fractalius.

[Diane Miller]

Nice idea and well-executed! What would you think about doing a gradient lightening the upper area, from about the yellow table on up, to give a sort of fading-into-the-fog effect? The more intense color and detail up there pulls my eye and competes with the more subtle FG elements.

[Dennis Bishop]

That multi-colored diagonal looks great, and I like the way your processed it. Intentionally cutting off parts of the blue table was a good idea, I think. The texture says snowflakes to me, and that's fun. I took a look at the texture online, and I like that you placed it the way you did with the smaller, in-focus circles at the bottom.

[Anita Bower]

Good choice for this theme. I line the angled, repeating shapes going off into the distance. Maybe they go on forever. Thinking about Diane's point, I tried darkening and upping saturation on the first two tables, and I liked the result. Just an idea. Interesting texture.

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Great graphic image and I love the texture and the colours of the tables.

[Cheryl Slechta]

Nancy, I love the feeling of the tables floating in air into infinity. Nice gentle colors and I like the snowflake-ish background:S3:

[Nancy Bell]

Thanks everyone! You gave me some ideas and here is a combination of them. I desaturated that orange color in the upper part and increased the saturation in the blue and purple tables.

Diane, I haven't used gradients before and all I saw in PS were darker at the top than the bottom, not the reverse as you describe. There must be some easy way to reverse it.

[Dennis Bishop]

. . . I haven't used gradients before and all I saw in PS were darker at the top than the bottom, not the reverse as you describe. There must be some easy way to reverse it.

There are several ways to affect the direction of the gradient. One is by your choice of foreground and background colors. Assuming a black/white gradient with black and white as the foreground and background colors in the toolbar, switching the foreground and background colors will change the direction of the gradient. There's also a Reverse box in the gradient options that appear when you're using the Gradient tool. However, the most important thing to remember is that, when you drag the cursor to get the gradient, it will start with the color on the left (when you look at the gradient shown in the options) and end with the color on the right. Because of that, you can reverse the gradient by the direction in which you move the cursor.

I did this with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. The first step was to set full desaturation and some lightening (using your original post). Because that would affect the entire image, I inverted the mask so it was black and no change was visible. It happened that the foreground was white and the background was black, so I just went with that and dragged the cursor from the top of the image toward the bottom, stopping at the green table, thereby making the effect strongest at the top.

[Diane Miller]

That's what I had in mind -- good work, Dennis.

Instead of making the adjustment globally and then masking it, you can also select the area first using the Quick Mask method (see a sticky in ETL) and then it will automatically mask any adjustment layer you make.

[Nancy Bell]

Thank you Dennis & Diane! I will experiment with this.

[Kerry Perkins]

Really cool Nancy, I love the geometry and the processing is super! I do like the application of the gradient that Dennis did, the look of the tables disappearing into the snow is a nice touch.