Week 3a
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Here's a picture of penguins. I took this while on vacation in Las Vegas last week. They were part of an exhibit at one of the casinos. 

I thought I'd give this picture a big change to make it (hopefully) more interesting. I first added a color balance adjustment layer and modified the midtones setting to 15, -10, 20 to give the rocks more depth of color. I used a blend mode of burn and set it to 71% opacity. On that adjustment layer I then selected just the penguins with my freehand tool, inverted the selection, and applied a PSP7 plugin called Xenofex - Baked Earth (default settings). I then inverted the selection again and added a brightness/contrast adjustment layer set -t -7 and 25 to bring out the penguins a bit more, as they had gotten a bit washed out. Finally, I inverted the selection one more time, added an invert adjustment layer and set the blend mode to hue 56% opacity.

This is the final product. It looks like a black and white image, but with character!

Here's my first attempt, ever, at making a custom brush. This was an interesting lesson and I had a lot of fun!
Here's the image

 

Kaleidoscope

 

Threshold Layer

 

Custom brush

 

Here's an image I made with this custom brush! (Actually, I made lots of them, but I finally stopped and posted something!