Welcome to the first Cracks blog, with a bit of a graphical bent, because over the last weekend I found myself both homeless and then booked into this Hotel courtesy of our local Mayor of Beziers, M. Robert Menard who met us outside the house and was both charming and sympathetic after a huge fire in the adjoining property made their towering party wall unsafe and liable to fall and crush our house. I was lucky because I was already planning on driving up to the Jura on the Sunday so only had to rough it for two nights and our two cats were reasonably happy in my renovation project house around the corner.
mouse-over for before view.
Back at the hotel I awoke at dawn, opened my shutters to this scene below, the sun was just coming up and catching their illuminated Hotel sign with its first rays of golden sunlight, I quickly grabbed my Iphone and took several shots.
When using the new cracks pack, to make a Fine Cracks PNG ‘sing out’ we’ve found that by using the ‘Bevel and Emboss’ blending options on one layer, then duplicate this layer and invert it in a top layer, then play around with the opacity sliders until you get the desired effect.
Remove parts of cracks that obscure faces etc with a soft brush at around 30%, repeating until the desired effect is achieved, as I did with the above Hotel sign image, removing the embossed lighter cracks from its dark background areas.
Firstly in processing, I used our Orford Nik Fly Preset to balance the image before opening up in Topaz Impression, as always I just used their painterly effect at 50% strength, so as not to degrade the base image too much.
Finally, our Textures, I used a new PNG texture 21 transparent cracks Plate as described below. Then I opened the our New Cracks pack from the summer, Distressed Painterly into Russell Brown’s Paper Texture Panel Plug in and tried a few textures and almost immediately settled firstly on Diptych which made it a little too red so I then also chose our Belle Epoch texture and turned the final layer into a bright green to enrich the green tones. And Voila, a souvenir of a disrupted weekend!
PNG 21 Cracks @ 63% Soft Light
PNG 21 Cracks @ 69% Soft Light with Bevel and emboss filter, removed from background areas.
Diptych @ 67% Soft Light
Belle Epoque @ 35% Overlay, turned bright green with colour effects slider.
The crack textures are from the Fine Cracks Pack, Diptych and Belle Epoque are from the Distressed Painterly Pack.
Please visit our Pack page or Combo Pack page to buy Flypaper Textures. Or our Preset Page to buy Nik Presets.
We recommend : Topaz filters !!