Stone House

[Carrots]

This is the full house of the "Door leading to darkness" post.

style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"This is the B&W version, which I prefer. The door and the window are competing for attention imo. The pole (tree trunk) in front of the window prevents me from cropping everything except the window out. No one wants to see a window thats obscured with a pole.

style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"About cloning the pole to look like a tree, I'm still thinking about doing it. The thing is that that is not how it was. It was poles not trees, so I'm a bit reluctant to do it.

[Carrots]

This is a slightly different crop, and in colour. I may have oversaturated a bit, but I like the slighty exagerated colours and contrast.

[nlp239]

I'm glad you decided to put the pot back into the image. I too like the monochrome much better.

I don't know if I make sense but if the left was cropped tighter it might be better. IMO, the post should be left as a post.

[Stevekin]

To nearly suit both of you .



Carrots.

Slight change with this one, majority done as I said in your other post on this house with the exception of a quick and dirty edit of the post next to the door.

Take the clone stamp tool, make it slightly larger than the width of the post. Now take your sample from anywhere next to the pole but then move further up the pole to start cloning. Just click and drag in one movement for a short amount, then select another sample point and again, move away from this point to start the cloning.

This way you won't be sampling immediately next to the pole where you will be cloning to, therefore not duplicating repetitively.

[julies517]

i really like the color version too. i love all the warm colors and texture and then the green pot. the mono is cool too, though it reminds me of the movie "the ring" for some reason, like that scary little girl is going to come out of that door .

[Carrots]

Thanks for the replies!

Stevekin, did you do the borders manually, or with some sort of plugin?

You did a great job of editing this one too. The way that you completed the little plate in the window is truly amazing! And it does look better with the tighter crop on the left.

I havent watched The Ring yet, I think I should make a plan tosee it some time.

[Stevekin]

The plate wasn't 'completed' as such. I copied and pasted the plate to the bottom right, rotated it to change it's shape and stretched it to make it bigger. Because of the low resolution it stood out, so copied and pasted the bottom right plate again but this time just positioned it in the middle.

I don't think to use borders very often, so don't have many in the form of actions, which would save time if you use them a lot.

To do this one, double click the background layer to turn it into a 'normal' editable layer, this becomes Layer 0. Go to Edit/Stroke choose the width of the black outline, I used 6 pixels but experiment to see what you like the look of. Make sure 'Inside' is selected and the colour should be black by default. Click OK.

Now go to Layer/New/Layer or press Shift+Ctrl+N on the keyboard. Go to Image/Canvas size, make sure Relative is checked and in the two boxes input the amount you wish to increase the new layer to. This needs to be larger than the layer with the picture on it so that the drop shadow can be seen. I used45 in each box. On the same layer, (layer 1), go to Edit/Fill use White as the colour click OK.

In the layers palette drag the top layer, (layer 1), to the bottom. If the original layer was still the 'Background' Layer you could not do this, so this is one of the reasons we changed it to layer 0. Now you can see your photo again.

Double click the Layer 0 to bring up the Layer styles box and click on Drop Shadow. Here you can set how you want it to be, no rules about direction, size etc, only what looks good to you. My example was this : Click and drag the direction line to the angle you want, I chose 135. Move the distance slider to 18, leave the Spread at 0 and move the size to 3. As I said, play with these to see what you like the look of. Leave everything else at the default settings.

In your other photo I also expanded the canvas on the photo layer, made that white and added a Bevel and Emboss effect to make the outer edge of the extra white border stand out.

Hope this helps.

[Canna W]

Carrots - the colour version I think is gorgeous! .

Losing the poles (for me)makes it better though - the window and doorway bothhold so much of interest , as does the texture of the building. Very nice.

Stevekin - your instructions are wonderfullyclear. I'm off to see if Elements has this drop shadow on layers menu option thingy.....that explanation was just great!

Caroline.


PS....Have done so. I did what you said and it worked perfectly! Very interesting. I think I have used drop shadows before with text, but I've never used it way. Thanks.

[Carrots]

Thanks for the nice words, Caroline, and thegreat help, Steve. I haven't had the nerve to try and replicate what you did yet. But one of these days when I'm calm and relaxed I'll do it.