We’re having major sand-dune renovations!
Our coastline isn’t as built up as the more trendy next door Provençal beaches, we’re cut off from their beaches by the Camargue wetlands.
The main difference being that ‘Nice’ has no sand, only pebbles and Cannes has to import it every spring, whilst we have plenty!
They’re now trying to protect and conserve our dunes with these narrow corrals of fences, which in turn help capture the blowing sand.
And of course, give us more photographic opportunities!
I shot this using my new Lensbaby Optic 80, which I’d recently imported from LA at great expense, as it cost me over 400USD
including an import duty charge of around 100USD by the French, I’ll never do that again!
But for all its troubles the Optic 80 is fabulous, its a vast improvement on the basic Lensbaby, and worth every penny, as the less harsh, more controllable soft-edge is a perfect partner for use with our textures!
One thing that’s not good is the vignetting at the top and bottom when used at full ’tilt-shift’ thus an extra bit of processing is called for.
But of course texturing does hide a multitude of sins!
Once again I called on our friend, Russell Brown and his fabulous automated texturing panel with our Flypaper Textures Taster Set to process this image, plus Nik colour efex pro to sweeten the overall coloring. We’re hoping further panel upgrades will be coming soon and then we’ll all be able to use our full size packs, until then I’m loving this automation, as it saves me Soo much processing time!
Ok, the science bit! Firstly, to help the painterly effect I passed the image through Photoshop, Reduce Noise
Filter, with the reduce color noise @ 100%, this tends to soften, which is ok, because I then ran it through the watercolor filter Brush detail – 14, Shadow, Intensity – 0, Texture – 1.
This watercolor filter and the Touchstone texture are a marriage made in heaven, and its a processing combo I often use, for dreamy, summer images like cornfields, and beaches.
Touchstone – Soft Light @ 100%
Dangerous Liaisons – Hue @ 30% (flipped vertically)
Dangerous Liaisons – Multiply @ 14% (flipped vertically) change texture color to a grass green tone
With the green tone added from the textures, I now flattened and opened in Nik color efex Pro, to zap up the colors and add a dreamy factor.
Firstly, I used the High Key filter and then the top Pastel filter.
The rest was doubling up the image to beef it up again and a slight toning down of the color.
(please note, Russel Brown’s Flypaper Panel script will only work with Adobe Photoshop CS5 and the new CS6)
Please visit our Pack page or Combo Pack page to buy Flypaper Textures.