Photo a Day, 2 June 2006...I loved the heart shaped petal on this rose bud... I've decided I'm going to try to use adjectives for titles this month - try to get away from the obvious "Gertrude Jeckle Rose" or "Iris" and evoke something more. Very soft and delicate color in contrast to yesterday's "Elegance."

To emphasize the declicateness, I decided to move away from the standard rectangle and drew mask layer using the lasso tool and my wacom tablet to mask the photograph. The edging around that was created on a separate layer using the same mask (CTRL click the layer mask of the flower) and then using Image>Stroke and a stroke (4px centered olive green sampled from the image - hold ALT to sample). I left the mask and did a Gausian blur (2px) then removed the mask and did a 2nd gausian blur (2px) so that the inside of the edging is more blurred than the outside edge. Title effect: Fill-0% (so only style effects show); Color Overlay 75% of a light pink sampled from the rose; Drop Shadow dark pink sampled from the rose, 75% Opacity, Distance 2, Spread 0, Size 4; Bevel and Emboss Inner Bevel, Smooth, Depth 251, Up, Size 3, Soften 3, Shadow Mode used dark pink sampled from rose; Texture was added to the background also using sytles with Bevel and Emboss > Texture. Typically I burn in the edges of my photos a slight bit using a curves layer set to multiply and then use the gradient tool to mask in the burn - with this one I did the opposite. I dodged the outer edges a bit using a Curves Layer set to Screen with opacity set to 70% and masked out the rose to that it wasn't effected. I then did a slight burn on the heart petal of the rose to make it stand out slightly more... the image to the right here is the same image without any dodge or burn done to photo - all that has been done on the right is ACR and a touch of sharpening.

Title Font is Imperial Script by P22