New Fun Effects!

I have new digital toys. They are texture effects called Dirty Pictures, to lay over photos to make them more visually interesting, or well, Dirty. I recently bought them from Totally Rad Actions (they had a Black Friday sale, my only Black Friday purchase), who provide all sorts of fun and useful photoshop tools for photographers. These effects are used like filters. Where I don't want the texture to exist (e.g. over faces), I can erase it. It's even set up so that I can make up my own textures! I'm thinking of creating some based on my pen and ink comic drawings. Maybe in January, when I have time to breathe.


I figured I'd share several versions of the same pic. Here is a high-contrast black and white. And below, the original image... well not really, it's photoshopped so the colors are enhanced and such, and I removed a random guy walking in the background (because, it is much more fun when an outdoorsy picture looks like it there exists no other people and we have the whole place to ourselves - isn't that why we wait for people to get out of the background?)


Anyways, I always try to optimize the "plain"photo before applying effects, though further tweaking is usually required even after B&W conversions.