Photoshop Archives

2023 May

May started with the Spring booster shot for Covid. It seems we are on the list for Insch for the Covid shots now. It’s not the easiest place to get to, being very rural roads – but the little cottage hospital is quite the nicest and most friendly vaccination centre we’ve been sent to.
But the vaccination shots are always a struggle for my PVS/ME. A couple of days in bed with mainly liquids and sleeping – that’s the ‘knock-out’ – followed by a week or two to get back to some level of energy, sleeping, and eating. The big challenge is to take it slowly. I feel OK for an hour or two, and then try NOT to do too much!

It has been a very slow start this year … winter has dragged on and on. It started early in the autumn, and hasn’t released it’s grip fully yet.

As May progresses the season does seem to be changing to the ‘summer’ pattern. The back rockery has really taken off, and is spilling over with colour! The temperatures are rising!

In the front garden we have our fragrant yellow hedge of Azalea Luteum spilling over with bright colour! It has taken years of careful work to reach this state, and we are quite proud with the results!

The temperature is improving, but there’s no rainfall. It looks like we will be repeating last year, when we had to get out the hosepipes and start to water round the most vulnerable plants. It was tiring, but essential to keep the garden alive!
With the return of some warmth and sunshine, we also have a chance to discover just how bad the damage is in the garden after the 8+ months of ‘winter’. There’s a lot of freezer burn on all the bushes, and quite a few of the smaller plants have perished. Not a pretty sight! And the drought that is shaping up will not make recovery easy.

But as the month progresses the rhodies and smaller azaleas bring wonderful colour back into our garden and lives! I have a yellow azalea luteum under my bedroom window. Its fragrance is so welcome.

The top layer of the front garden is full of the red, white and yellow of the azaleas and rhododendrons. The colours are so bright and cheerful.
But soon they will be past their best and the potentillas will take over!

It is time to move the geraniums and other plants that we have over-wintered in the hallway back out into the shelter of the porch, where they can catch the morning sunshine.

As the warmth, sunshine and dry conditions persist we can finally think about taking a look at the world around us, and collecting some photos along with the fresh air and exercise!

I took one of my Infrared cameras with me when we finally managed to spend a morning in Fyvie Castle gardens. The harsh winter has taken a toll, with so much of the pathways overgrown with weeds.

There are still so many signs of Storm Arwen! It devastated so many trees. But there are still some standing proud! The other sad thing is the Avian Flu which means we cannot feed to ducks!

The indoor shooting is never laid aside! Here I was determined to capture the Daphne bush with its delicate star-like pink flowers. And a Yuta Segawa Japanese miniature vase is the ideal companion!

And there is always the fascination with light and glass prisms and spheres! Here with a backdrop of a blue patterned winter scarf. The play of light, and a bit of post-processing too!

And so on to June, and the drought deepens
Back to the 2023 Cover Page
Back to Notebooks cover

Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2023 Elisa Liddell

2023 July

July and the weather starts to change. Southern Europe is experiencing drought and temperatures soaring into the 40+c but by the 14th we are cold, wet and windy. What a change!

And July saw the arrival of “OverEasy” our very first Mini, and our very first automatic too!
We spent several Sunday mornings in June on driving to and from Aberdeen to locate the dealership. Navigating Aberdeen and it’s ring-roads is no joke. So much has changed since we left several decades ago. Where we recognise the street names, we find they look nothing like what we remember when we moved out in the 1990s.
The hard work and false turns all paid off in the end, and Mike managed to drive us safely home with no problems! The rest of the month was a period of getting used to the car, and how it works!

Like everything these days it is all built around the computer system. And the driving seat feels like a airplane cockpit … with so many functions, so many things to learn!
And (again as usual) the manual is very little use, as every actual car seems to vary.

Learning can be scary with today’s impatient drivers and poorly maintained roads!

But we did manage to drive safely to a few our essential places, such as Fyvie loch and gardens! Seen through the lens of an infrared camera … which gives quite an alternative view of the world to the one our eyes see!

And so on to August, and
Back to the 2023 Cover Page
Back to Notebooks cover

Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2023 Elisa Liddell

2023 June

And so June begins … and as the month progresses the search for shade, for cool, and for relief from the growing heat is only matched by the constant need to try and help the garden to survive!
It may sound insignificant, but we have invested so much time, effort and money into creating a very special 1/3 acre here (from a bare field). And to sacrifice 25 years of work without a struggle? No!

So every drop of water we can take from the normal household usage, such as washing vegetables, is carefully collected and taken out for evening watering! and there’s the hosepipe as a supplement.

The pattern of the days is to start early and dribble a hosepipe round the most vulnerable areas where light sandy soil doesn’t hold the water as the direct sun raises the temperatures into the 30s.

And happily we even have our newest plants surviving and blooming!

Yes – the once bare small ranch-style fence is now home to some 6 clematis plants. We thought we had lost them during the long hard winter, but they have survived well, and are blooming!

So in the cool of the evening we water them carefully and enjoy their beauty!

Of course the entire turn-around in the weather is taking some adjusting to ourselves!
Our houses are not designed for coping with hot summers, as we have discovered. Only ONE pane of each 3-pane window can be opened, and not very far. Fine to maximize seals against draughts – not helpful when it is very hot! So every possible window and door has been open, trying to allow for a through-draft if there is cooler air in the evenings and overnight.
Bedding is reduced to a light cotton duvet cover for sleeping. And it’s very hard to sleep. We have no access to outdoor shade in the garden, as our trees are away from the house, and on slopes. We have to drive to Fyvie Castle grounds to find benches where we can sit in some shade by water!

Our summer visitors, the barn swallows, are struggling too. Last year it was the wet summer that affected their nests – this year the nests are crumbling from the extreme heat and dry conditions. And there is nothing we can do to help. Bowls of water are placed round the garden, and all the birds do drink and wash using them or the hosepipe – but we fear for the migrant visitors, as massive temperatures await them as they fly south to southern Africa. Next year will be the real test of how many make their way back to us then!

Turning to the more mundane, what have I been watching on TV and reading?
“Close to Vermeer” was a C4 documentary following the creation of the Exhibition bringing together as many Vermeer paintings as possible in one place.

We enjoyed the documentary, and bought the book accompanying the Exhibition. Fascinating reading ahead there. I already have some fascinating books all about colour, and the history of the paintbox we have today ….

And the other big one is by Chris Van Tulleken called “Ultra-processed People” …. “Why do we all eat stuff that isn’t food … and why can’t we stop?” I got this as a Kindle download, as the book was so expensive! An eye-opening journey through what the food “industry” has been doing to our food without our knowledge, and without any concern for our health and well-being!

And so on to July, and will the summer gets even hotter?
Back to the 2023 Cover Page
Back to Notebooks cover

Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2023 Elisa Liddell

2023 April

I decided to dedicate this month’s Journal to the world of technology, and how it has impacted my/our lives, especially since the pandemic – though the changes started a while before with the move from Windows XP to Windows 10.
It has been a seismic shift for so many of us, and a shift that will be permanent, I think. The speed of change that has been forced on us has been hard to keep up with.

I considered myself quite ‘tech-savvy’ before Covid hit – I’d been running websites since the mid 1990s, both personal and about the developing hand-held computers … the forerunners of mobile phones. I was interested in the personal computer dimension more than the phone aspect, as I was disabled and housebound. So I bought the very first iPod Touch.

The operating system was the same as the first iPhone, which made life easier later on! Seen here with earbuds and several iPods, crammed with music.

By the time mobile phones really took off, several operating systems were familiar to me!

I’d also had a keen interest in the technology of CDs, DVDs and their tape-based forerunners. I’d been a Walkman user since the early 1980s, and a keen user of digital music ever since …. taking music with me wherever I went.

Music, podcasts and radio recordings were loaded onto my iPods, and played through speaker ‘docks’. Of course the ‘docks’ usually needed to be plugged into a wall socket – so not really portable!

So by 2019 I was well equipped with digital machines, and quite familiar with a range of home and online services and personal players. I’d even ditched my old Nokia phone, and moved to the iPhone, starting with the iPhone 5!
We had just bought our first smart TV, and our PCs and laptops were all hooked up to the internet. I’d been posting to the photographic website Flickr since 2012 – so I guess I was quite well prepared when Covid hit us as 2020 began!

Now the world changed in ways we weren’t expecting, and the pace of change accelerated. Shopping online was something we were used to – living remotely it was always an essential for us. So we had some existing accounts we could use. But with lockdown it became essential to order everything online, even the weekly grocery shopping trips were forbidden! We were all now prisoners in our own homes.
We were luckier than most, in having a good sized garden for a little exercise. But being in the ‘shielding’ group, at least initially, we couldn’t ‘stray’ further. And the links to the outside world by phone and mainly by Wi-Fi broadband became increasingly important.
Online banking, online shopping, emailing – all had been part of our lives before – but they became the only means of conducting our lives.

Perhaps the biggest technological ‘leap’ came with the development of the smartphone Apps. There is now an app for almost everything! I didn’t expect to be conducting banking business, or paying bills by smartphone. I was used to using the computer for financial transactions … but surely not my iPhone? But yes – it has become possibly the most essential piece of technology most of us need to function in 2023!

It has been an accelerating (and very expensive) journey through the Covid years! And now, in what we call our “post-covid” year(s) I find myself fully equipped with an iPhone that can ‘talk’ to the world, read the news, alert me to the next refuse collection, or local roadworks, pay bills and play music, listen to the radio or watch TV. A watch that can monitor my health as well as tell the time, tell me the weather and alert me to emails, iMessages and so much more. Airpods that can give me all the quality of sound reproduction I could get from a speaker dock, and silently so as not to disturb Mike.
All told, 2019 seems a long time ago, and another way of life!

And so on to May, and I turn my mind to summer
Back to the 2023 Cover Page
Back to Notebooks cover

Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2023 Elisa Liddell

2022 August

calendar for August 2022 — Calendar for August 2022

The heatwave that has been dominating the summer across the Mediterranean bringing record-breaking temperatures, drought and wildfires has spread north throughout Europe and finally arrived in the UK. August saw our local Aberdeenshire area feeling just a little effect in comparison, but it was enough for me! according the Wiki

“The 2022 United Kingdom heatwaves were part of several heatwaves across Europe and North Africa. The United Kingdom experienced three heatwaves; the first was for three days in June, the second for three days in July, and the third for six days in August. These were periods of unusually hot weather caused by rising high pressure up from the European continent. There were also more grass fires and wildfires than average, and in August a drought was declared in many regions”.

We found our daily pattern was to move our planters from the overnight shelter of the porch to the patio each morning to catch the shade at the back of the house … and then by late afternoon they were all moved back to the porch as the sun blazed down on the back garden. Chasing the shade cast by the house itself was the name of the game!
Every drop of water we could collect from indoors was used for the planters too. Trying to keep little water pans scattered across the garden for the birds, and putting out apples each day was the best we could do to help the birds.
We had to move the cars to catch a little shade, and open their windows too … as the metal baked. Temperatures outdoors were in the high 30s at some point each day, and overnight didn’t dip below 20c.

Every window and door was open to the max. trying to get some circulation of cooler air. Not very successful as our houses are built and designed with heat retention in mind, not heat dispersal. I slept with just a cotton duvet cover (no duvet inside) and windows as wide open as possible … but sleep was difficult. We ate less, cooked very little and drank lots of water! As August passed and the temperatures moderated we were so grateful … just a taste of what most of Europe was enduring …. but enough for us!

It all meant that at least half the month was spent on dealing with the heat, and little else was accomplished. And we emerged from our brush with the heatwave feeling exhausted and low on sleep! So there wasn’t a great deal of interest to report!
I tried to keep my photography going, with different lenses recording the local scenes.

Using my infrared camera here to record the barley field across the road from us. I use infrared mainly for landscape shooting, and like my other landscape lenses it has been little used since the pandemic began!

Looking the other way from the farm gate, back up to the Kirk. The IR filter here is the 720nm, which gives a soft, gentle effect, and allows a little colour to enter the image.

Another way to combat the heat was to shoot at night when things are cooler! Still too hot for comfort, as our windows don’t open very wide. But the front door looks inviting!

One thing I miss is my collection of sun-specs. When my eyesight was 20/20 I had some elegant and unusual sun specs. Now it is one pair of varifocals with light-sensitive lenses. Not quite the same!

My Flickr groups keep me alert with weekly challenges. Here a macro group asked us to shoot ‘sound’. This is guitar strings in the bright sunlight, seen up close from an unusual perspective.

And another macro shoot brought me close-up to my pink geraniums. As well as keeping them well watered and in the shade, they are also beautiful photography subjects!

It’s not often I can find agapanthus flowers – these ones came from the supermarket. shooting them is a real challenge, as they have such an amazing flower-head!

One thing that I wanted to do was to celebrate my friend Laurie’s wonderful creative work with Japanese temari balls. While she was here in May she made me two new balls, and the making of one of them is described briefly here. It gives just the smallest hint of the skill and complexity of the art form.

And so on to September, when the world here cools down!

Back to the 2022 Cover page
Back to Notebooks cover

Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2022 Elisa Liddell

2020 August

Collage for August 2020 — A collection of images posted on Flickr this August 2020

As August began (month 6 of COVID) it was becoming clear that the devolved governments across the UK were moving away from the ‘follow England’ pattern that had been established at the start of the pandemic. The UK (England) government had been mishandling the pandemic from the start, being slow to react and ignoring the evidence of what was happening elsewhere in the world.
Scotland had suffered badly both in the spread of COVID-19 in the community, and especially in recorded deaths. So as England moved to lift the lock-down and ‘get the economy moving again’ there was a more cautious approach here. We remained in lock-down longer, until the indicators were clear that the virus was under control. But as August began the decision was made to get children back to school. We start the academic year some weeks before England, so we would be the first to see how the ‘back to school’ experiment played out in real life! It was a pivotal moment for us all, and watched with some trepidation. We have a small Primary School in our village, and older students travel to Turriff daily, so our village was deeply involved!

As restrictions lifted we remained in our own protective ‘bubble’ that hadn’t changed since March – we were free to travel to our local beauty spots for exercise, bur we remained largely self-isolating. Nothing had changed to make us feel we were less at risk. It was still the elderly who were dying! As we have no children or grandchildren, and no family living locally, it was ‘lock-down life’ that remained our new ‘normal’. So we sat on the sidelines and watched events unfold! August set a new pattern for us, following the daily coronavirus updates. both with our First Minister and online too. It was hard work, and took quite a lump out of our time …. but we wanted to know what was going on.

Continuing our lives as close to ‘normal’ as we could, I continued with my watercolour experimentation and learning.
I was faced with my usual problem, I have PVS/ME and that means my life is a balancing act between what I want to do and what my meagre energy will permit me to do. Do too much and the consequences are brutal – weeks bedbound as my body tries to regain a balance. Long Covid is just the latest manifestation of what has been dubbed ME or ‘Yuppie Flu’.
So with a head full of ideas about what I wanted to do with my watercolour adventure I started moving beyond copying Cezanne. I wanted to paint every day, so I planned to do a small daily sketch. A study of something close to hand (I have rooms full of objects I use in my photography) it would sharpen my ‘looking’ skills as well as my drawing and painting skills. I also wanted to take some of Cezanne’s pencil sketches and paint them. So I began!

sketch book pages — Daily sketch and Cezanne pencil sketch

If I was photographing snail shells, why not paint them too? And give Cezanne’s pencil sketch of a tree a more Scottish feel?
I so enjoyed it all, but found that my energy was exhausted very quickly when I was sitting at a table, painting. I began to remember why I had abandoned pastel painting in favour of photography. I could shoot in small bursts, and then lie down. Painting demanded I was sitting for a longer time, and using muscles in very precise ways.
Time to rethink.
So I had to take the painting much more slowly, and even reduce it to two or three times a week. Sad, but essential if I was to integrate painting into my life over the long term. So I found a way to make the most of the painting I could manage to do ….

Eggs blending photo and watercolour — Daily sketch eggshells and blend with photo

If I was photographing eggshells, then paint them as well. Then, when energy permitted I could make a blend of photo and watercolour … and get something new and creative using minimum energy!

landscape blending — Blending a Lensbaby photo and watercolour sketch

And a step further with the blending. A landscape that one day I might paint …. well…. I could combine it with a sketch and make a new artwork!
And finally my paint-filled month was rounded off with another idea. Again using trees from the local environment, but this time extracting them, and using their shapes to go in another direction. Using masking tape, and practising using wet washes, I began to create ‘ghostly’ trees.

tree into watercolou — Taking the bones of a tree and playing with it in watercolours

It might take weeks to explore an idea, but at least it was feeding my hunger to create, paint, and photograph! A world to explore that took me away from the world of the pandemic.

And finally, yes, we did manage to get out (with cameras) and enjoy more of the freedom to roam. I took my infrared camera with the most colourful ‘Goldie’ filter and shot the trees at Fvyie Castle loch.

infrared bench in blue — Infrared of bench in blue

Processing them into cool blues – and vibrant reds!

Goldie Infrared — Goldie filter infrared of trees at Fyvie loch

And so August ended with me feeling very tired, but very happy with the creative results. OK, it was baby steps, but the ideas were forming, and my first blundering steps were enough to encourage me to continue with my ideas!

on to September
Back to Journal Page
Back to Notebooks cover

April 14, 2019April 21, 2019

What to do with an egg!

Empty eggshell — Making drama out of left-overs!

Following on from yesterday’s post of a discarded eggshell. I was looking for something more playful and experimental to make from the original image. Some photo-manipulation is called for – which means more play time in Photoshop!
Here I chose to add a macro shot of the inside of a plastic, multi-coloured slinky…

Inside a colours slinky — The original macro shot of a coloured slinky

But the full colour version would take the eye away from the egg. So I needed to make something more in tune with the existing dark background, but adding another dimension to the image.

The Eggstra-ordinary combination of design shapes and colours

Hopefully it works – giving some visual interest to the black areas, and using the curves of the slinky to echo the natural curves of the eggshell.
The original slinky shot is on Flickr: here
The larger version of the photo-manipulation is on Flickr: here

Failure revisited!

The final final version — And at last I am happy with the result.

or Can I make something out of nothing?

I have so many folders that I mentally label as “Failed shoot”. It’s a product of my habit of taking a few shots ‘just in case’ … just in case I later regret that I didn’t! I came across a folder from January 2018 just called ‘Pinks’. I was curious, it rang no bells, triggered no memories. Inside were just 5 shots. Then I remembered. I was putting away Christmas lights that we hadn’t used. And I thought I’d turn them on and maybe take a few shots before they vanished back into the cupboard for another year. In a hurry to finish the tidying up I put them together with a jug of flowers that was close by – and took a few shots.
The results didn’t impress me when I looked at them later on. The lights didn’t sparkle at all, they added nothing. The wall I’d placed the jug against was nicely neutral, but in my haste I’d overlooked the cast shadows. Rather disappointed I mentally stamped the folder “Failed”. Only 5 shots in all, so I didn’t delete them at once.

Later that year I brought the folder out of mothballs, and took another look. I wanted something to play with, to experiment with the newly installed suite of Photoshop plug-ins called NIK. And if I liked the image that emerged, I could use it with my Sunday group that specialises in post-processing to transform a photographic image.

collage of 5 failed shots — All 5 shots that I took that day, and marked as ‘failed’

step 1
Looking at the originals, I decided to try number 3. I didn’t want too many cast shadows, and I didn’t want too much of the table surface either … I might want the jug to feel like it was free-floating.
step 2
was to take it into Camera RAW, straighten it slightly, lighten it, and crop off the dark band on the left side. Then into Photoshop to play and see what might work to make something visually interesting out of the image!
step 3
was to launch the NIK panel. What might work? I selected Color Efex Pro 4 panel and then Bi-colour, as I wanted something to jazz the image up and bring it to life.

That looked like a promising start to making something new.

step 4
the top colour looked nice and rich, but it was a solid blue-purple block. Maybe it needed something subtle to break it up?
I’ve been collecting texture layers for a long while now. Flickr users are so generous, and make lots of beautiful texture layers available to fellow Flickr members. I also started to look at commercial collections for added effects. Design Cuts was the place that I began, as they offer bundles of discounted graphics and files, and I could try out different suppliers and see what suited me. My big favourite is 2 Lil Owls and from Denise I have some amazing effects, like light flares.
So I looked in my 2LO collection called Crazy Flares, which mixes light flares with all manner of textures. And I selected this one

These light flares needed to be overlaid, and then used in Screen mode for the best effect.

2 Lil Owls Crazy flares applied as an overlay

That’s better! beginning to shape up!
step 5
was to save that image as a jpeg. I needed a single layer for my next idea. So I saved the PSD file as it is, then saved the layered image to start again. I opened the newly saved image as a Smart Object into a new PSD file as this allowed me to easily play with the Photoshop’s inbuilt filters … I wanted yet more light effects ;o)
step 6
was to apply the Filter -> Render -> Lens Flare effects. Because the image is a Smart Object I could access the effects window and adjust it easily to get the intensity, direction and actual lens simulation that looked best.

The final transformation – does it work?

Yes – that looked OK, and better than my starter image!
step 7
was to gently wipe out a little of the bleaching effect of the light falling on the petals – a little more intensity for the petals, please! So I highlighted the mask, and removed a little of the glare.

And now I have something that has more interest than the original – there’s more going on visually. Colour-wise there’s an interesting play with the bi-colour division set up in the NIK. The final lens flare has added to the ochre tints in the lower half. The light flares and text texturing has lightened and added interest to the upper blue-purple half. And the flowers in the jug are the vertical that joins the two horizontal planes. Finally, the petals towards the top right of the image are balanced by the lens flare circles in the bottom left.
Maybe I’ll post it and see what happens … now I just need a name for it ;o)
So I posted it on Flickr to see what people thought – here