It's been a looooong time since I did much with Photoshop other than than using it for photo processing and compositing so tonight I broke out the virtual canvas and the Mixer Brushes and had at it....
... and since my "proper" etching press is still dismantled and in various boxes, I spent the evening tinkering with techniques to recreate a somewhat faux old, etched/litho styled image.
The photo on the left is the SOOC starting point.
From there I worked various layers in Photoshop using the Mixer Brush tools to develop a more painterly image.
Created some custom brushes to work with the Pattern Stamp tool, added a few doses of texture, various filter effects and a bunch of adjustment layers to get the contrast the way I felt it would be if the image were being inked and etched.
The final tie-in was to create a custom Gradient Map to mimic the bluey/indigo tones that you get when you ink a plate and press (the color is never quite black black) and then another Gradient Map to match the shades of antique paper.
On the whole I am pretty pleased with how it turned out and the "recipe" should work fairly well on most images - so it's been filed in the "book"....
Oh and there was another batch of Jam today ..... this time Pineapple and Mango (with Lime and Ginger) ... very yummy too! Fortunately, there are only a few more empty jars left ... perhaps one more batch of pickle and then we can call the preserving adventures done for a while!