From Clicking to Creating

The Dogwood 52 prompt this week is my favorite, Photographers choice. I can do what I’m told and follow the prompts, but I prefer to do my own thing. Just ask Al how much I like being told what to do. Lol.

Anyway, I started looking though my photos to try and get some kind of an idea what I wanted for this week. Photography is slim to none when we are in Utah, so I had to use some photos from earlier in the year to create something. I’ve had this idea in the back of my head for a while, it’s not ground breaking, but just something fun.

I took these 4 images into Photoshop and created a layer mask for each one, so I could get the image I wanted. This tutorial on the Adobe website explains layer masks, and how to use them waaaayyyyyy better than I can. I’ve never tried to combine this many images, so it was fun to experiment, and I learned quite a bit in the process.

I saved the image back to lightroom, and did a few more adjustments. It’s always best to edit your photos before you take them to Photoshop, because once they are saved back to lightroom you lose some of the editing capabilities since they are now a TIFF file, and not RAW. But, I wanted to lighten the image, and that was easy enough to do.

One thing that I really love about lightroom over photoshop is the ability to go into the editing history, and see what it looked like, and not lose my current edits. Photoshop lets you go backwards, but you can’t go forward again.

This is the history panel on the left of the develop module. I have clicked on the very bottom, were you can see the photo was saved into lightroom.

(click to enlarge)

I can click anywhere in this history section to see what changes I made.

After I added an adjustment brush, which we will talk about in a future post, this was my final result.

Lightroom has always been about non-destructive editing, and this is a great way to use that to your advantage. Sometimes when you’re editing along you may not like were you’re going with it all. So the ability to go back to any given point in the editing is nice, and then go forward again if you want.

The 2 Lil Owls prompt this week is sunset. Again, I had to go back to an earlier image. There is just nothing like an Arizona sunset. Look close and you can see the moon in the arms of the saguaro.

Spring is springing all over the country, so what have you created this week?