Blue Teardrops

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I didn't take any pics yesterday that I wanted to share today as my daily. We were at Ritter Park in Cary for a few minutes, and I fired off a few pics of the boys having fun, but it was very windy at the park and despite being 54 degrees, and we didn't stay as long as we would have otherwise. Mom was cold!

Ritter Park is near the boys' old stomping grounds across the street from where they went to preschool, so they always enjoy a trip, back in time, there.

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At any point, today's daily is a chandelier shot taken at Home Depot this past weekend.  Here's the original:

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I knew I liked it right away but was bothered with the setting for the pretty round beads.  I really liked the reflection of the other strands of beads reflected in the closest strand.  So last night I started playing around with the shot some.  I ended up using a Spotlight Lighting Effect to get the outer edges dark.  And then I played around with some bokeh style textures (not in the daily) and then an action from The CoffeeShop Blog called CoffeeShop Denim.  If you've ever wanted to remove all the color from a shot except just the blues in the shot, this action is for you.  I'm using PSE7 btw, but this action works on PhotoShop too.  As with all these actions, you can do the steps yourself, but the action is a nifty way to combine several steps into one saving time and giving you a way to achieve these results without fully understanding all the individual steps.  Granted, installing the first action into your PSE or PhotoShop might cause you to have to concentrate a bit, it's not trivial, but once you have it figured out on your machine, each one after the first is pretty simple. Rita on The CoffeeShop Blog has some great instructions, and you can ping me if you're stuck (on a Windows box:-).

Here's a golden version that more maintains the original colors:

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I'm open to the opinion that the gold one is prettier, I just thought the blue one was more unique and that the cold blue fit today's winter weather with snow and ice now settling into much of the country.  I like my daily pictures to be on theme with the calendar:-)