Shadowed Scarlet

This time I decided to go find a picture I took myself and edit it.
The results were good, but I spent more time on it than usual.
Here beside me at the top is the original. This is from years ago at my old house. It was either from our garden or our neighbor's - I can't remember which.
One of the things I've learned with photography is sometimes the great one come to you - you just have to get out there and take lots to find something worthwhile.
That's where this one came from.
This one is today's piece, though it took a few days. I like it - it's better than it looks. It came out rather blurry when I uploaded it. I learned that if you select individual colors and turn them into layers, you can make look like anything . I used layer masks and noise gradients to make the light and dark. It took practice to figure out how to make the light not look lame.
Today's tip: When imitating perspective lighting, duplicate your "light" and erase different parts of each. having different light layers for different areas is key.

Chrome Blossom

I've re-discovered this tutorial I found long ago.
It teaches you the way to make the top of these two images.
I haven't found a good use for this yet, but the big accomplishment was finding it. It took me forever to find it on the internet. This is a tutorial I visited long, long ago, back when I knew precious little of photoshop. So long ago,
that even if I did bookmark it, it would have been lost to time on my dad's computer.
I found it though!!!

What you have to do is paint-bucket a color of your choice and then filter> render> clouds, then distort> pinch (100%) two or three times, render> lighting effects , and then (filter)sketch> chrome and set the layer blending mode to linear light.

This one I tweaked with my crazy difference gradient trick on a layer mask. And then duplicated the layer mask as a normal layer set to overlay.

Posting And Scripting

I've been making up for the entries I've missed. I'm caught up now, so no more confusion. I post them in order, so the more recent days that I've done I haven't posted until now.
So everything's in order now.

We'll all live happily ever after. Now all I need is a girlfriend... and a life.

Anyways, I've been searching the topic of scripting in photoshop, and I've discovered how to do it. There's and ExtendScript ToolKit that came with Photoshop that I didn't know about. Now I do, and I'm going to begin to play with it.
I made a piece of code that toggles layer visibility. It's not much, but it works, and it's a step toward learning the language. It's JavaScript, by the way.

Coding in JavaScript will probably be an additional little hobby for Photoshop. I may start designing my own filters. I have some cool techniques that are complex filter combos and stuff that would be really cool if I could make them a one step built-in effect. For now, though, I don't know enough, and it's something I'm going to have to work on.