I guess you could technically say I'm still stuck on a farm theme. This shot was actually taken at Homestead Gardens in North Smithfield. Once again, I wanted to do something a bit different with this photo. I view the Photo a Day challenge as an opportunity to explore the more creative elements of photography, so I'm trying to pull out interesting twists to relatively mundane subjects. In this case, when I saw the subject I knew I wanted to do something along the lines of a pen type outline with a washed out color tone. Achieving it with the very rich detail in the photo was more of a challenge. I ran it through my HDR filter to ensure I had a broad range of color and contrast with which to work. The pen outlines were actually achieved using a photocopy texture filter, and merging that with a background layer using a linear light blending mode. It was too washed out at that point, though, so I added several levels adjustments in different layers to bring out the amount of color I wanted. Some saturation and hue adjustments softened the colors sufficiently. The red tones were adjusted separately. A deep blue filter was added as the finishing touch.
