L'ange des bois...

click to enlarge

L'ange de...what? Titles sound more pretentious in French, don't they?

Time is almost up for the Brushes Monthly Special. Record low participation. Record high readership. I'm stumped.

In any case, I wanted to do one last brushes experiment with the set I made before moving on to a new theme for January. The photo was taken in Paris. How often do you just happen upon an angel walking down the street and into the woods? It was kind of like a scene from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (with a bit of Russ Meyer thrown in).

I'm not sure that I like the with-brushes version better than the toned and shaded base photo, but I do love playing with the depth and ambiguity that brushes can add.

Inspiration or just schadenfreude?

I spent hours today doing no less than FIVE head swaps for a family photo. The result is very convincing, but it took way too much time. It's my own fault for suggesting the head transplant in the first place (but five?). I blame myself for suggesting that a composite could make all 15 people look their best, but I also blame television and the movies for making Photoshop wizardry seem effortless.

The computer corollary, of course, is hacking. Ever watch Chloe Sullivan on Smallville (It's a guilty pleasure)? Sure Clark, let me just hack into the NSA on my iMac.. Frantic typing, wide-eyed intensity,and 5 seconds later...Done. Or Chloe O'Brian on 24? Sure Jack, let me just hack into the Chinese Embassy... Frantic typing, a look of consternation, and 5 seconds later... Done.
(Note to all parents-to-be: Name your daughter Chloe and there's a 95% chance she'll be a computer genius capable of thwarting terrorist attacks and/or Lex Luthor. The other 5% grow up to be waifish models-turned-actresses, so name at your own risk.)

But back to Photoshop. A blog that I find laugh-out-loud funny is Photoshop Disasters. They feature pro-level disasters that have somehow made it past teams of pros and into print. For example, a favorite recurring theme is the hand left in when removing a person from a photo as seen here (or does Kate Moss just have a very shy and skinny friend?):


Even Apple isn't immune from Photoshop disasters. Maybe I'm getting too much enjoyment from other people's mistakes. But somewhere buried in the schadenfreude is an inspirational message:

As Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus would say: Take chances, make mistakes, get messy! (A random reference, I know, but I'm a storehouse of useless trivia.) Instead of showcasing my best, polished work as part of a self-promotional campaign, I want to explore new themes and techniques, and in the process, I hope to inspire you to do the same. So don't be shy. Try out some Monthly Specials in the new year. If the pros are turning out enough disasters to fuel a blog (and it only picks on the pros, by the way), we can afford to make a few mistakes as well.

Hmm. Was that a dubious source for inspiration? Probably. But in any case, laughter is good for the soul.

Best wishes for Christmas...

My posts have been less frequent due to holiday business and a never-ending antibiotic-resistant sinus infection. Hopefully, I will have time for some more brushes posts before we move on to a new theme for January.

I kept things fairly simple in the photo above by adding two brushes. Eva likes to call herself "blue bug," so this seemed an appropriate way to express her imagination.

If there's any tip here, it's that your brushes project need not be complicated. I hope to see some of your work with brushes on the Monthly Special page before the month's end.

Hi-Res Paris Flea Market Brush Set

Christmas comes early at Take-Out Photo. For all my readers, I just made a free brush set of old manuscripts, post cards, maps, and official stamps all acquired at Paris flea markets. The above image is a small sample of some of the stamps—I mean, brushes (They really function more like digital stamps). Most of them go up to the maximum resolution of 2500 x 2500 px.

I made them in CS3, so I'm not sure about compatibility, but I did test it in Elements (6) and it worked!

As for the "Terms of Use"—I'm all about "free," so use the brushes for whatever you want. Obviously, I would love to get more people reading my blog, so I welcome any credit that points them my way. But that said, I know what a pain it is to track down info for every brush used. My only restriction is that there be no online redistribution of the brush set without my consent.

Thanks to dropbox (which I use every day and love), I can upload the .abr file of the brush set (I think there are 22 brushes in all) and share it with you through this link (fingers crossed). The file is pretty big. I am including both the uncompressed and the (disappointingly not-that-smaller) zipped version.