The Last couple weeks have been keeping me busy.  I have been getting everything set up to function while being self employed, picking up some photo and web design projects, but I am still trying to set time aside as well to hone my craft.

I was just visiting Phlearn.com for the first time in a month or so to go through some of Aaron Nace's tutorials.  If you haven't heard of Phlearn.com, it is one of the best Photoshop learning sites around that you can get for free.  He also has some great pro tutorials that you can go through at a pretty affordable rate.

One of the lessons that stuck out to me was one on gradient mapping which is something that I have not played around with too much with in Phototshop so I decided to give it a try.  The end result is what I have attached above.

I started with a photo that I had taken about a month ago from a concert where the performer was wearing an anime inspired mask.  Initially, I was playing around with some more metallic colors and found one with whites and silvers that really stuck me, but I wanted to make some adjustments.  I introduced some blues into the gradient and was really pleased with the colors that were coming out.  The image was still really noisy from the processing and just didn't feel right, so I grabbed the blur tool and started painting with it to even out the image and give the impression of motion to the (water) hair while still trying to keep the overall detail to the image.

I ended with brushing in a bit more color and doing some more toning.  I am pretty pleased with my first attempt but I definitely want to tray this again and maybe even revisit this to do some painting with the image to see what else I can do with it.  I regret not recording this one but will have to next time around so I can share the process with you.  What are some of your favorite experiments that have turned out well in your favor?