Red Tree super-imposed over the Central Park West cityscape

Did you ever wish you could make up your own landscape? Painters do it all the time. They might take some mountains from one place and a lake from somewhere else and paint them together to create their own Shangri-La. I used to paint — back when computers were practically non-existent and I was a budding artist at the High School of Music & Art in NYC in the early 70′s.  I painted landscapes in oil on canvas. I was ok, but not destined for greatness as a fine artist so I traded in my paint brushes for a career in graphic design. It’s a way to earn a living, while still being creative, but sometimes I still get the itch to create just for myself.

Now with a digital camera and Adobe PhotoShop CS4, I can once again use my imagination to create new landscapes (and seascapes for that matter) right on my computer. I can add my own touch to nature!

How do I do this? I use the layers palette  in PhotoShop CS4 to combine the two photographs that were used to make up the finished image above. Each photo gets its own layer. The photo with the red tree is on the base layer and the buildings on Central Park West are on a layer above. I then add a layer mask to “reveal all” to the buildings layer. Now, making sure that I have the layer mask selected on the layers palette, I use the paintbrush to brush away the parts of the buildings photo that I don’t want. I adjust the opacity of that layer to give the photo a more distant look and making the red tree layer pop more. By using layer masks instead of the eraser tool to get rid of unwanted parts of an image,  my original images are untouched so that if I need to go back and add parts back in I can. When I get the composition the way I want it, and after I have saved the PSD file, I then flatten the final image and save as a tiff, a png or jpg file and I am done.

The above image is available for purchase at my Dive Art & More gallery

Below are the two original images that I used:

Photograph of a red-leafed tree in autumn

Central Park West with the Central Park Lake in the foreground

I’ve just opened two galleries at Imagekind: Dive Art and Nature Photography

This gallery allows you to choose custom mats and frames for prints and you can actually see how each will look with the artwork you select. It’s a really terrific, easy to navigate site. Please come and visit my galleries!

I have been diving since the late 80′s and have been a designer even longer than that. Last year I bought my first underwater digital camera housing and started to play around with underwater photography. Not really knowing what I was doing, my first shots were lets say, less than perfect! As I took more pictures, my compositions got better (the fish still weren’t stopping to pose for me but I stopped chasing them too). I started concentrating on the corals (they don’t move) and found so many different and unusual patterns under the water to photograph. Back on the surface, I put them up on my computer and started playing around with the images in Photoshop. I combined several images together into one to make some pretty cool abstractions. Then by adding filters I was able to create images that look more “fine art” than realistic photography.

I started to get excited about what I was creating and couldn’t wait to get back into the water to start adding more subject matter for my art. I bought an Epson Archival printer in the hopes that I could start to sell my artwork as prints suitable for framing. You can check out the available prints at: Underwater Fine Art or click the link on my sidebar. I also started to put these images on t-shirts and other great gift items that might appeal to other divers. You can see my available tee, sweats & other unique gifts at my shop Wear My Dive Art or by clicking the link on the sidebar.