California Dreamin'

Since Texture Tuesday is on vacation this week, I'm using an image that I created for The Dream eDition of TT and posted on my original  Flickr Photostream, Pink Trees and Sunshine, back in July of 2011. 

This photo is from my last visit to my hometown of Torrance, California, two years ago. I am doing some serious California Dreamin' these days as it's back to the weather that Portland is famous for...cold, wet and gray. Sigh :-) 

I'm also thinking about how much fun Kim and a few members of the Groupies of Kim Klassen Group on Facebook are having at the Shutter Sisters Oasis down in Palm Springs, California. Can't wait to hear about their magical adventures and see their beautiful photos!!!

Taken with my humble little Canon Powershot A460, my first digital camera which I dearly love :-)

{mouse-over to see the SOOC}

When I processed this photo I was using CS4, but had not yet delved into Adobe Camera Raw in depth. When I upgraded to CS4, I purchased Scott Kelby's book, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers, and even though I now have CS5, I refer to it frequently for basic techniques. Scott devotes a significant portion of the book to ACR, so I decided that I should become more familiar with it, since it's a part of Photoshop.

So for this image I made all the edits in Photoshop. I made two copies of the background layer, changing the Blend Mode of the first layer to Soft Light at 50% and the second to Screen at 30%. Next, I created a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer and adjusted the Hue, Saturation and Lightness as shown in the screen shot above. I masked the sand to brighten it and reduced the Density of the Mask to 70% in the Mask Panel (shown below). Also shown above are the adjustments I made in the Levels Adjustment Layer.

I added a dark green Color Fill Adjustment Layer and set it to Soft Light at 40% to give it a vintage tone. I used two of Kim's textures, Yesteryear (Soft Light at 30%) and Believe (Overlay at 20%). I masked the upper right hand corner of the Yesteryear layer and reduced the Density of the Mask to 50% and Feathered it 5 pixels (shown above). I have to admit, that since I edited this so long ago, I don't remember the reasoning for some of my steps :-/

The font is Clive Barker, from dafont. I changed the Blend Mode of "california" to Soft Light at 60% and "dreamin'" to Multiply at 20% to make each word blend with the sky and at the same time stand out against it.

As you may have noticed, I redesigned my blog layout...again. I have been going back and forth about whether or not to have a sidebar again and this time the sidebar won. While I like the idea of a single column to focus on the photography, I felt that mine was just too minimal. Anyway, I hope you like it!