Altered Sprite

Well, I've been playing with photoshop again. To your left, you'll see a thumbnail of an altered picture of my Winter Sprite. I've dashed off another seasonal Postcard Poem for this picture to grace. The picture with the postcard is bigger; in fact, it will take about 30 sec. to down-load. But, at least you get a hint from this thumbnail.

So, let's talk process for a minute. I took the original picture, along with pictures of Elsie's Winter Sprite, and some rather attractive weeds in my yard, with my Canon PowerShot A200, which records the images at a resolution of 2.0 megapixels. I imported the shots into Photoshop. I have access to Photoshop Deluxe at work, and have Photoshop Elements at home. I resized and cropped pictures in Photoshop Deluxe, and stored them on a handy server.

The original image, at 1024 x 768, provided both versions of my Winter Sprite; I simply cropped one version a little closer than the other. One of the paintbrush options in photoshop is "Dissolve", and you may set the percentage rate of dissolve. The background colors here were applied at 45%. Just for fun, I used the object tool to add the purple circle. Although this level of dissovle already had a "pastel" effect, I wanted to increase it, so I applied the "rough pastel" filter.

I compressed it using "Save for Web", imported it into my postcard format, then dashed off the poem — fragments of which have been running through my head all day. To create the thumbnail you see here, I resized the picture and "Saved for Web" again.

Ain't technology fun, sometimes?