Monet a Photo - Playing with Nik Color Efex Pro 4

I took this beautiful photo of the hanging Spanish moss while I was in Florida. It's lovely and it sure looked like it would be fun to play with. I've been watching a lot of CreativeLive.com classes (which are free while they are live and an amazing source of photography information with incredible instructors). While watching they demoed some Nik Color Efex Pro 4 filters. I got to download a couple of these for free. The catch was that when I did that, it loaded Nik Color Efex Pro 4 to my computer for a limited time. The problem is not that they loaded, it's that now that I've played with them, I will want to own them. So let me show you what I've done.

I took this beautiful photo of the hanging Spanish moss while I was in Florida. It's lovely and it sure looked like it would be fun to play with.

Awhile back I had done some portrait photos for a friend of my daughters. I selected one of the photos and used the mask tool to remove her from the background. Then I was able to bring her in to the Spanish moss photo. But before I brought her in, I did a little manipulation with the Nik Color Efex Pro.


First I duplicated the Spanish moss photo. That later was mirrored and moved over. I wanted to see more of the branch to the left and I needed to fill the space to the right.
I used 2 of the Nik Color Efex Pro filters - Photo Stylizer and Sunlight.

Next I brought the masked version of my model into the working file. Then one more Nik Color Efex Pro filter...Classical Soft Focus...over the whole image. I reduce the transparency a little and a little sharpening to her face only and ooolaaalaa.

I am really enjoying this compositing stuff and the Nik Color Efex Pro 4. I'm in trouble now, ha, ha...

Lesson - Try out some add on software like Nik Color Efex Pro 4.

- 1 Photo a Day....makes me happy (and a better photographer) Bonnie McCaffery (always a student)
Here's links to the equipment I used.