Wednesday 4 October 2017

Backgrounds with Photoshop.

Sometimes we all need some interesting backgrounds for our artwork, and I always start with my collection of photos. I have taken many photos of tree bark, cut tree logs and so on over the years and although they are all interesting and varied, they aren't always suitable just as they are. The colour might be wrong for a start. The pictures below are all of tree bark except for 2 which show the cross section of a cut log.
 It is so easy to change the colour of an image in Photoshop and one of the easiest way is just to invert the colours, so that orange for instance becomes blue.  The bark image above is much more interesting with the colour changed from dull greyish brown to a jade hue.
      The cross section of this log looks more like an ammonite or shell with the colour inverted.
         Not so interesting is this palm trunk, but it could still be used as a background, looking like mountain peaks or rocks.
             Smooth plane tree trunks can be made more interesting with the invert command.
 This one is paper bark, and the flakes of bark make for a very interesting background once the colours have been inverted.
Another cross section of a log, this time changed to green hues. It looks more like contoured fields I think.

4 comments:

Sue Catmint said...

I am so excited by the ideas in this post, Sue. I have also taken lots of photos of bark and now I can really have some creative fun with them.

Mary said...

Long time, no visit. Blogging has been off my radar for a while but I am hoping to return to the interesting sites around.
Just a question about one of your pictures - one looks like it is stitched. Is it?

mycamerandme365 said...

No stitching at this stage Mary.

Mary said...

What an amazing picture, it already looks stitched.