Hedge Trimming

I’m cutting back the elder bush which has shot up this summer in the hedge beyond the herb bed. It’s so tall that even I needed the stepladder to reach it.

Experimenting with the ‘Art’ filter of my Olympus E-M10II camera, I thought that the trellis, ladder and ivy looked rather Victorian, so I used the camera’s built-in pinhole camera art filter.

History palette
History palette

In Photoshop, I used various filters to give the feel of a deguerrotype: Lens Flare and Dust & Scratches, followed by Sepia Toning from the Actions Palette.

There was no lens flare in my original, but I thought a light shining brightly through the herbage at the top of a ladder would be a suitably biblical reference for a Victorian photograph.

Admittedly, Fox Talbot wouldn’t have had access to a Black & Decker 3-in-1 aluminium ladder.

Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo: for readability, I’ve gone for the light version of the user interface with large print, and with the tool names popping up as soon as I hover the mouse over the icon.
My original scanner, in a GIF image from 2002, so please forgive the pixelation.

I’ve been using Photoshop for twenty-two years but I might finally be moving on.

In 1996, I bought my first scanner which came with an OEM version of Adobe Photoshop 4.0 included in the box. This was quite a bargain as, at that time, if you wanted to buy the same version of Photoshop on it’s own, it would have cost you more than the scanner and Photoshop bundled together!