Clouds

This weekend I've been sorting through all the hundreds of photos I've taken ready to back up to an external harddrive. While doing this I realised just how many photos I have never gotten round to playing around and editing. So I had a quick five/ten minute play around.

This is the completely un-edited photo, just some clouds the other week over our back garden. 

And here it is after my little play around. Not the greatest and I think I'll definetely come back and try it again... one day. But it was a fun five minute job.

The how to is very simple.

1. The first thing I always do before I start editing is to duplicate the background layer, this is so that I can make sure the original layer doesn't get touched and I can always go back to the original photo. A keyboard shortcut for this is ctrlJ.

2. Next go Image - Resize - Image Size. In this area you wan to make sure that the height measurement is the same as the width and that the constrain proportions box is unticked. Once done click ok. This should turn your image into a square one.

3. With this photo I then did some slight adjustment layers, mostly brightness/contrast and I used sponge tool to saturate a little bit, but this is all down to personal taste.

4. Then go to Filter - Distort - Polar Coordinates and click the Rectangular to Polar box and then click ok.  You should end up with an image similar to above but it will have a line from the top tothe middle. There are various ways you can get rid of this line some say to use the clone tool but I prefer the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Do small little areas until you are happy with your result.

5. You can then leave the shot as is or if you want and what I did here you can add a textured layer. I used one that was a free download from Practical Photoshop's website but there are plenty of free textures available on the internet. I clicked on new layer and pasted the copied textured into that layer and then used the move icon to stretch the textured image to fit my image and then click the green tick to say ok. I then added a layer mask and made sure the brush tool was on black and painted back in some of the original cloud image. Remember if you use a layer mask you can uncover or cover up the image that is below the layer with the mask. Black uncovers and white covers. Hope that makes sense.

And that is that. I did do some extra little tweaks in picmonkey mostly the airbrush and wrinkle remover around the edges to make them blur more into the clouds and a play with some of the effects. But again that is just personal choice.

The Polar Coodinates filter is such a fun filter and very much worth experimenting and playing around with. Here is another photo I used it on last year, the original photo was a shot of a sunflower.

If you do read this and try this out (and I hope my instructions make sense) I would love to see your results.