Pixiq

St. Valentine’s is the perfect excuse to make a secret photo project for your lover.

The Victorians really knew how to do this up right. Artwork, collage, fabric, lace, personal poetry, three dimensions - no style or material out of bounds. Since Karl’s birthday is next day, my secret Valentine project each year takes on silly, over the top proportions. Here’s one project that relied on happy accident of place, lighting and a little simple twisting of geometry, along with the finishing touches of a border from onOne software.

The year we were the official photographers for the Professional Photographers of America convention I arranged two days of post-event decompression at the Camelback Inn Resort in Scottsdale. The hillside grounds abound with photogenic desert plantings. At dusk the soft, warm slanting light was perfect for an alpha-male portrait. He’s holding his favorite 70-200MM Canon lens and that miracle of event lighting the Ultimate Light Box flash modifier. And yes, my darned old Austrian husband can be as prickly as the cactus. Small inside joke.

I love the portrait straight of my sweetie, but immediately though how to carry the joke a bit further. This is what Photoshop is for! A wicked inspiration suggested geometrical alteration of nature, namely making the rounded cactuses into hearts.

 Here are the Photoshop manipulation steps:

• slight clarity +15
• local color alteration minimize red face, even out background colors (too bright yellows), small clothing clean up of distracting details
• partial desaturation of background to make figure pop
• subtle grunge overlay made from same image by enlarging just some cactus paddles, desaturating, dropping in on partial opacity mask
• each cactus paddle altered in Filter> Liquify
• stretched areas left over from Liquify corrected with healing brush in Replace mode
• border treatment selected from onOne software (Photo Frame 4.6 is one of the few software actions I ever use. Infinite possibilities, I don’t know how we ever did without it! And you can now get onOne’s suite as a stand-alone, without needing to function under Photoshop.)