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fierce oaks invade California town
Fair Oaks is a great, quirky little town northeast of Sacramento. Motorists stop to let feral chickens cross the main street. While waiting for a restaurant to open for dinner, I was struck (not physically :S3:) by an oak tree that had grown over the sidewalk. It wasn't until I started working on the image that I spied features in the bark that looked like a face, and that changed my direction in processing.
Nikon Coolpix P7000, ISO 100, f/4.5, 1 second, zoom at 8.1mm (35mm film equivalent is 38mm)
processing highlights
- cropped from the right for composition
- selected what showed of a building facade in the upper left corner and blurred it heavily
- Topaz Simplify -- saved watercolor preset, 73% opacity
- Alien Skin Snap Art -- saved watercolor wash preset, Color blend mode, 69%
- Curves -- a couple layers; the more important was to darken the sidewalk so it wasn't distracting; A gradient was used on the mask to give a feeling of depth.
- Photo Filter adjustment layers -- warming and cooling with inverse masks; The cooling one was restricted to the bark; the warming one to everything else.
- two Belle Fleur textures -- Hard Mix, 27% and Vivid Light, 11%; both masked to portions of face
- Belle Fleur texture -- for the vignette, Multiply
- dodge/burn layer to finesse the face, Overlay with a 50% gray fill and soft, low-opacity white and black brushes (so much better than using the Dodge and Burn tools)
- Fractalius -- three saved black & white presets, one masked to tree, Multiply, various opacities
- Snap Art -- saved black & white Line Art preset, Multiply, 37%
- Simplify -- saved edges black & white preset, Multiply, 88%
