Sometimes You Can Get There From Here

Sometimes you get some "unusual" assignments. Like design a wallpaper pattern that's bright, uses pink extensively and is very graphic. Now, being a photographer of sorts, that's sort of a weird request. I'm not an "artist", computer or otherwise, so what can I come up with to fulfill the requirement. There's, undoubtedly, images that have pink in them in the archives, but the "graphical" ones are probably of recognizable buildings or structures. I thought this assignment would have to involve some kind of OOB (Out Of Box) thinking. So, given the requirements of it being a graphic, being predominately pink, and having a repeatable pattern, what do we start with and where do we take it. To find out how today's image came out of the shot of the flowers on the river, hit the "read more".

Today's image started out as a 20 - 25 pixel slice of the flower shot. The slice comes from the area of the shot with the maximum pink shades. Therefore, it's a vertical slice about 1/8 of the way in from the right side. That gives us several shades of pink, along with a little blue and a little green. The first step was to use the Crop Tool (C) to pull out the thin slice. Additional canvas was added using the Image/Canvas Size to bring it back to a workable size. Using the Transform Tool (CTRL T) the slice was pulled out to the left and right until the "slice" became streaks covering the canvas. The layer was copied (CTRL J) and the Transform Tool employed again to rotate the streaks to about a 45 degree angle. Again (with the Transform Tool still selected) the layer was pulled out to cover the image area. The Blending Mode was changed to Lighten to absorb the colors of both layers.

The result, up to this point, showed promise but was still a little on the dead side. Just a little bit of dimension was needed. Using the Magic Wand Tool (M), for the first time in a couple of years, with the contiguous option turned off, a shade of pink was selected. This picked up the pink in a couple different areas of the graphic. Going to the Layer Styles dialog Bevel and Emboss was selected to create dimension. Not much, just a little bit, but enough to give some life to the graphic. Normal steps to finish an image (Sharpening and a Vignette) were applied and the messing about was over.

What's here on the blog is not the graphic presented for the assignment due to remuneration considerations, but it's a reasonable example of the steps used to achieve the effect.