Brashley Photography

Way before we decided to take up photography, back in 2011, we visited Sidmouth on a windy day.  Anyway this image was taken of the waves crashing over the rocks.

There is something about it I like.. so I decided today to give it an Impressionistic paint effect in Topaz Impressions 2.

I like what the software did.  However, I wanted to go further with the image.  So I decided to Edit it in Photoshop.

As you can see by the layers panel… I added birds, a boat and barrels as well as a moon.

First of all, I added a boat..  then the birds and finally the barrels.  However, I then decided to add a moon and another sky overlay.  As I wanted the moon to appear behind the birds I moved the layer down so it sat just above my image.  Then came the sky… as I wanted this to appear in front of the moon but behind the birds, this was added just above the moon image.

A lot of the layers that were added needed to be given an impressionistic paint feel.  To do this I then selected one of the elements via the Filter menu… opened it up in Topaz Impression created the effect I wanted then saved it.  For all the other elements I just highlighted the layer element and did Alt+Control+F in windows.  And this added the effect.  Sometimes I did this twice on the layer to create more of an impressionistic feel.

To blend the elements in I used clipping masks for that particular element.  Primarily I used the levels and saturation adjustment for most of the element layers.

Once I was happy it was back into Lightroom where I did some more edits.