The hot air balloon fun continues today! I’m having such a good time with these images from the balloon festival last weekend, I thought I would share a bit more with you today: A mobile tutorial of my latest piece and a print giveaway! Isn’t that a perfect way to kick off a holiday weekend and Paint Party Friday?

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment and tell me which image you would like to receive if you win (images shown at bottom of post). Of course I’d love it if you subscribe to my newsletter, or like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter or Instagram… but none of that is required for entry. Just leave a comment. I’ll draw and announce the winner on my blog on Tuesday, September 3rd. Easy!

And now for the steps to create this piece, called “Lighter than Air”…

It starts with the image captured Saturday morning, using Slow Shutter Cam to provide me with some motion blur:

I’ve learned enough playing with balloon images this week to know that those little smears of balloons in the distance would be distracting in a final piece, so I removed them with the Retouch feature of Handy Photo:

Now into Snapseed to brighten the exposure up. I could have done this in Handy Photo too, but I prefer Snapseed for basic adjustments:

Next I started playing with textures. I decided that this one, out of Handy Photo, was starting to have the feel I wanted. Light, soft and bright!

I also liked this texture, out of XnView FX, but the color was a little more yellow than desired:

So I toned it down with a blend of the previous two images in Image Blender:

Another texture of the original image I kind of liked was this one, out of Distressed FX:

The “edginess” was great but the color was too strong and I didn’t like the way it created a bright hot spot in the middle, so… time to blend! Using my previously blended image (above) in Image Blender and the Luminosity blending mode I could get the edge effect without the distracting color. Be sure to play with your blending modes! You can do amazing things with modes like Luminosity at times.

I decided I wanted to soften it up further, so I took the original adjusted image, and ran it through the chalk filter of Autopainter II:

And then blended it with my image-in-progress. This not only provides softer edges, but shifts the color back toward neutral from the warmer tones it was starting to have.

Looking good! It’s close now. I took this blended output and ran it through Distressed FX again. There were two versions I liked. The first one, for it’s crackly texture and the second one for the color.

I brought these two into Image Blender for the final blend, and I’m done! The image met my desires… it’s soft and a bit dreamy, retains the brightness of the original color, and has warmth without an overall yellow cast. Here is the final image again:

So much fun! I’ve soooo enjoyed editing these hot air balloon images this week. I like each new one I complete better than the last. Unfortunately, I’m nearing the end of hot air balloon images from the launch that I like enough to edit, so this could be the last. It’s too bad I can’t run out and take more starting images, since the festival is only once a year! 🙂

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Giveaway Time!!

Leave a comment on this post and tell me which of the following four images you would like to receive as a print if you win. I’ll draw and announce the winner here on the blog on Tuesday, September 3rd. Have a wonderful weekend!