Fisheye Fun...

This week I had some real fun playing in Photoshop.  I'm pushing myself to learn more about what I can do with the program, applying things I'm learning from various sources including Beyond Layers and through reading online information from Adobe.  I started with Bonnie's 'cobblestone road' texture. I added all of the coloured balls from a journal page I did by using the clone tool and then making additional copies of some of them, resizing them, changing their colours using hue/saturation adjustments, etc.

Once I had done that, I decided I needed a focal point so I opened the photo of a gull that I took in the spring and I used the quick selection tool to isolate the gull (by doing an inverse selection and deleting the background).  Once I put the gull in it still wasn't speaking to me so I decided to learn how to do a fisheye effect.  Instead of using a black outer frame, I selected a dark gray colour from the cobblestones and then played with the opacity of the layer so that the balls and cobblestone still came through.

I added a gaussian blur to the edge of the fisheye.  Because I had squared off the image after putting the balls on the background layer, I had lost the lovely framing that Bonnie's texture had, so I added another layer of the texture on top, adjusting the sides so it was square (sorry, I can't remember the blend mode I used on that layer).  The final step was to add another very subtle layer of blur to the entire image and then use my round signature brush on the blue ball in the bottom right corner.

These photos are being linked to Our World Tuesday, Texture Tuesday, Sweet Shot Tuesday, Photo Show Off,  This or That Thursdays, Photo Art Friday, Shoot, Edit, Submit, Fabulous Friday, and Photo Friday Link Party.