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Provencal Fountain
Whilst picking up my first two swarms of honeybees in the Provencal town of Bollene I spied this typical French village fountain, I quickly took this picture and dismissed it as I thought I could never use it as it was too cluttered.
Only after we released our Provencal pack did I look again and started playing with it. I chose one of our last years Nik Fly Pastel presets which blurred the edges, pulling it all together beautifully.
I then tried a very grungy zinc based texture from the Provencal pack and
Provençal Textures Launch
Welcome to our Provençal Texture pack! We’ve sourced this pack from ancient Provençal villages earlier this summer, using their natural clay tints which were mined from their world famous open clay pits that have also been used to manufacture artists pigments for hundreds of years. These soft toned pigments are sprinkled throughout this soft summery themed pack of grunge.
Winter Sunset
Jill and I would like to wish all our readers a Happy New year!
Here’s my first outing of 2019 just yesterday evening during a very dark and damp winter when the sun finally came out just in time for it to to set, so I rushed out to grab a few images before the light faded. My camera still had its new little 50mm and so I stuck with that.
Travels with My Aunt – hat and passports
Here’s a possible book cover set-up I shot several months ago, It’s theme being loosely based on Graham Greene’s famous;
‘Travels With My Aunt’ novel, but I didn’t like the final ‘before’ result as it just didn’t ‘mesh up’ so I filed it under ‘problem images’ and forgot about it until we were trialling the new Celestial pack and suddenly it worked! The final sepia effect pulling it all together, both softening and adding a real vintage travellers feel.
Celestial Painterly Pack Launch
Welcome to this years full pack launch into outer space! This time it’s another addition to our most popular Painterly series, its theme is ‘Celestial’ which includes the names of stars and noble gasses as we thought we could discern swirling nebula gases and the textural landscapes of distant planets, without actually moving to Canada and enjoying getting spaced out!;-)
We’ve created this pack to be as easy to use as possible and over the recent weeks whilst we’ve been trailing them we found them good at beefing up landscapes and still life’s a treat with their muted tones and misty depths.
Table Brushes
ack to work after a long hot, dry summer in France, where i’ve been busily turning our 300 year old barn into an artist’s studio come photo studio.
Along with concreting the earth floor I’m also fitting roof windows, the first is up and working and is partly lighting this simple still life along with the big open barn doors allowing the sunny gardens reflected light.
As i’ve also just purchased my very first 50mm prime lens and thought I’d very quickly try it out with this partly painted backdrop canvas and very old table.
Summer Sale and Pastel Preset Launch
Welcome to our latest pack of the ever popular presets for Nik Color Efex.
For this seasons launch we have a soft pastel themed preset pack to cool your hot summer photography! A whopping 50 cool new mostly pastel presets all for the usual price of a 40 preset pack, bringing you bang up to date with all our recent image processing. These presets can tone down those bright summer colours and soften them, pulling them together with a softer, more tonal artistic look. They also work well with winter shoots, warming up cold grey tones.
Bokeh Pack launch
We’re bonkers for Bokeh!
Welcome to another long awaited catch-up set of glittering Bokeh!
We’ve been working on this set for months and whilst doing so also noticed Bokeh is this seasons cool new look!
As we’ve been trialling them we discovered that layering them over dark contre-jour images really wakes them up and brings them back to life!
Summer in a jug
It’s been a wonderful summer here in southern New Zealand, in fact a record breaking one temperature wise. My garden has certainly loved the extra warmth, I’ve had a bumper crop of tomatoes and more cucumbers than I know what to do with, and the pumpkin has gone berserk, as a result my pantry shelves are laden with jars of pickles and preserves. I’m in the midst of bottling unsweetened apple puree at the moment, I use it though the year as a base for smoothies, the apples (and all the fruit) have been very early in ripening this year.
River Saone part two in portrait format
Shot towards the end of the the same Saone river shoot blog we posted the other day,
I thought I’d quickly follow it with this similar but also quite different image that was processed in a similar way.
I used a poloriser filter on the camera to bring out the blue sky colour.
For processing I used Nik color pro to lighten the bottom with the reflector filter, then saved and sent it through Topaz impressions to give it a slightly more painterly feel, this smoothed out the image a little, but I could easily have left that process out as its so subtle here.