hidden treasures

Earlier this week I found myself wandering around an op shop.  I know you will find that hard to believe!

Anyway I bought quite a few treasures including a flower press.


It is not particularly old or interesting but I have always just used books and tissues when I wanted to press some flowers so I though I would buy this little treasure.  Imagine my delight when I discovered the roses and grevillea and other flowers pressed between the leaves.

I have scanned them and will print the image onto some silk and then after that I will try to create something else with them.  Once it is done I will show you what I have done.

In the meantime I shall endeavour to explain one of my photo altering techniques as I have been asked how it did it.  
I use adobe photo shop for my pics.  It is easy to use.  First I select a pic and send it to  the standard edit page.

It doesn't need to be a special pic but if it has texture and colour that is better.  I chose this because it was already on my computer and I thought it would work ok and would show how the alteration works.

I next select the Filter option and this opens a drop down menu and I select Render.  From there I choose Lighting Effects.  Now this is where it can be complicated.  Near the top of the page you should see another drop down menu which in my system says default but if I click on the arrow I have a wonderful array of options.  From there I choose five lights down.  Lower on the page there is a light type option - choose spotlight.  Now the image is ready to save before the next step.

Now I open the item again and follow the previous steps except I now choose 5 lights up and that is that.

I usually do other things to the image as well to play with the light but I wanted to keep this simple.  I do hope it is easy to understand.

I find with photo alteration it is a lot of fun to just play with the options available - I would like to see what others do.