MORE COMPOSITES

Over the past couple of years I have been taking photographs of things I find that would make good textures.   I have a close-up collection of weathered wood, tree bark, lichen and fungi.   In the above image, tree bark is the background.   Lichen is in the top left and bottom right corners.   Weathered split wood in the bottom left and fungi in the top right.   Another tree bark image was used to fill the text.   In the Layer Panel below, there are three text layers all above the “Fill for Text” layer.   Above each of these text layers are merged copy of the text layers and the Fill for Text layer.   This was done to fill the text with something that is not seen elsewhere in the image.   This took me awhile to figure out how to do.   The fungi in the top right has a blending mode of Overlay, blending mode of the Wood in lower left is Linear Burn, all others use Normal blending. I experimented with various blending modes on all the layers with some producing interesting results.

My, my.   Such an improvement in Elements working with actions.   I had given up on actions since I could never remember from one version to the next how to install them. This is absolutely wonderful.   A couple presented here.   The first using Sara's double line frame.   This is a nice effect — thank you, Sara.

Many years ago I found a watercolor action that produced what appeared to me the most likeness to a real watercolor.   I now have this wonderful action installed in PSE 11 and you can too by looking for “Watercolor for PSE 3” by Erick Nguyen at ATNCentral.com.

This also has Sara's double border action applied.   I have a question — I stroked a narrow, 3 pixel, border before I ran the action.   During the execution of the action, this stoked outline was removed.   I don't understand why it did that.   As I write this perhaps what I should have done was change the canvas size.