Theme: Snowy flurry
Thought I would try out the snow tutorial (at least the falling snow type) so I gave it a try. I doubt that it snows much at the Salton Sea, being that it's 227 feet below sea level, but who knows? As some of you know by now, I love to play with words and to juxtapose concepts, like an egret in the snow... ;)
I started in LR2 by saving two different versions of the base image. It turns out that you can make a pretty nice soft image filter look just by taking the "clarity" slider all the way to the left. I did that and saved that image. I went back and took the clarity slider all the way to the right and saved that one also. I then opened both images in PS CS4 and copied one on top of the other. Now I had a very soft and a very sharp image to blend into the kind of look I wanted - soft but with some detail.
Added a couple of snow layers with noise, blur, and layer modes (screen) to make the flurry. Figured out way too late that I had made my flakes too small. Oh, the humanity! So, I went back to the snow layers and used "transform" to make them bigger, which made the flakes bigger. Biggest challenge was getting snow on the bill and legs, since these features are black and drop out with a screen mode layer applied above them.
Thanks for your comments!
