BURNING LAYERS

Kopia – Essence (1).jpg

This week the qurator’s contest theme is “red.” So I went through my portfolio and started thinking about which photos I could choose and which ones would fit this theme best. Flowers seemed a bit too common to me, so I decided to go in a slightly different direction.

I thought it would be a good opportunity to show you my textures. As a stock photographer I sometimes experiment with different kinds of images. Often it’s also a way to rescue photos that didn’t turn out well — for example those that are out of focus or blurred.
This mainly applies to nature photography, because those kinds of images are the easiest to transform. I use a lot of sliders in Lightroom to achieve a more unnatural look, creating something like abstract nature.

You might ask — what is the point of something like green mushrooms or blue wood? Well, textures like these are widely used by graphic designers and artists. They often serve as backgrounds for various creative projects and actually have many different applications. They can be used in posters, album covers, social media graphics, website design, digital art and even branding materials.

So for today, in line with the contest theme, I chose red textures, and now I’ll explain one by one what they were originally created from.

In the first photo, believe it or not, these are simply mushrooms. I don’t remember exactly what species it was and I probably wasn’t able to identify it precisely at the time. They were brown-orange in color and definitely not edible.

To achieve the effect you see in the image, I significantly darkened the shadows and shifted the color to an intense red. At the same time I reduced the sharpness to create smoother, softer edges.

The second image will probably be quite easy to identify. It is nothing more than a bale of straw. I enhanced the texture a bit and of course changed the color.

The next image, probably also one of the easier ones, is simply an unsuccessful photo of flowers. It turned out too blurred, so I decided to transform it into a graphic background. I darkened the shadows and blacks and brought out the red color.

This image was created quite some time ago and I have to admit that looking at it now, I found myself wondering how I actually made it. I had to check my stock agency portfolio to remind myself what was originally in the photo.

As it turned out, it is nothing more than rock formations. Just like in the previous cases I darkened certain parts of the image, leaving almost a black background and added a red tint. I think this kind of texture can work really well for many designers as a background for their projects.

The next image is also very easy to identify. Here we have tree bark. I enhanced the texture and added clarity to bring out more of the rings and grain in the wood. And of course, I changed the color.

In the next image we can see seaweed. Some time ago I published a post on my blog about what I managed to find on a beach in Portugal and this is one of those pieces of seaweed. Its structure and shape work perfectly as a background, so I believe more than one designer will make use of an image like this.

And finally we can also see here a mushroom. This time it is not a soft mushroom but one from the polypore family. It was already an older, very rough specimen. However, I reduced its texture a bit, lowered the clarity and slightly blurred the edges and its surface, creating a softer image that works perfectly as a background for various uses.