I feel I must explain or justify the odd image I’m about to submit as my week 3 of the One Four Challenge… This image came about because of a few external influences… 1) I’m reading Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened – so my mind *may* be a little warped at the moment, 2) Loré made a suggestion/comment about changing the orientation of the dog in the image and something about the pup looking like she was jumping out of the water…
I remembered a really cool section of the book, The Artist’s Guide to GIMP* where you can make it look like an underwater image. This is where I started… then once I had a rather cool looking underwater turquoise background I added the image of my dog that I had removed from her original background. But once I added her, I thought about how I didn’t really want an image of my dog underwater, plus it just looked fake.
I proceeded to play around with various ideas for coloring the background something other than turquoise, when I came across some presets for the gradient tool… I combined two of them for what I hoped would look like water and sand.
Mostly it just looks kind of psychedelic, which is ok too. And is kind of in the theme I was originally going for, which is my dog’s silly expression and some kind of fun looking background. Enjoy…
Kind thoughts and comments are welcome!
I have joined a month-long photo post-processing challenge called One Four Challenge, hosted by Robyn at Captivate Me. “This challenge is about processing １ image in 4 different ways over 4 weeks.” Every Monday Robyn posts a new version of her photo and challenges us to do the same each week.
Until next time…
~nic
* GIMP is Open Source software that is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows), it is a photo editor that does many (if not all) of the things you can do in Photoshop. You can download it for free here. The GIMP online manual can be found here.
Photography by Nic 
such a fun edit!!
Thanks, Cool Quilting! 😀
To me, it looks like someone is swinging your dog around by the rear legs. I love what you did this time. It just makes me smile!
Oh my, that is funny! 😀 Actually she is in the throws of rolling over and trying to be silly. Thanks so much, Emilio! 😀
Really like the graduated background, Nic, great effect. Your dog is fun, but I would soften it so it blends in better. Nice work though😊
Thanks, Chris! I’ll try softening for the next time, thanks for the suggestion. 😀
This is my first time seeing your different edits. – First your dog is very cute.
I liked the week 2 edit where is looked like the dog was laying in show.
I also like this version, it’s fun and different and just cute.
Here is the link to my edits:
http://wishesdreamsandotherthings.blogspot.com/2015/09/one-four-challenge-week-3.html
Thanks, Ida! I’ll go check out your edits too. 😀
Such creativity, Nic! I wonder what your pup would think about this 😉
Thanks, Stacy! She would probably think I’d lost my mind… which perhaps isn’t too far from the truth. 😛
😉
I like it! This looks great and you worked so hard, I am so impressed.
Thanks so much, Lore! 😀
This is fun and it does look like your dog is floating. Great job on the background, I totally see sand and light coming down through the sea 🙂 You could try running another texture of the top to help blend the dog a bit better into the background
Hmmm… I’ll have to try that out for the next version…. I tried all kinds of tricks to make her not look like she was floating… I added/changed the shadow under her so that she had a contact shadow, I made sure the light ray layer was on top of the dog layer so that the light would look right, and some other stuff that added depth… but yeah, she still looks like she’s floating… to be fair the light effect was supposed to simulate being underwater, not laying on the beach… so there’s that – heh 😀