Ingredients: one photo of branches against sky which I’d taken a long time ago; creative mood; photo editing software; imagination. Result: a scene from an alternate universe. Enjoy!

night-time cityscape, maybe?

Posted on 24 September, 2013 by Lyagushka (Meirav)

Sometimes I like to take one of my photos and change it into a totally different scene, like something from a different world. I did this last night, with a picture of water in a pond. It had just a little bit of stuff floating near the edge to make it interesting… A few tweaks of stuff like exposure, saturation, colour temp, and here we are:

night cityscape 016y by meirav berale

from boring screenshot to aquatic beauty

Posted on 23 September, 2013 by Lyagushka (Meirav)

First of all, have a look at this beautiful pic. Enjoy it. Allow yourself to see whatever your imagination shows you.

Now let me tell you how I made it…

It started from this boring screenshot of one of the folders on my computer.

I don’t even remember why I took that screenshot, but I decided it was a good candidate for experimenting with a new tool. The result was this interesting image:

I decided to play with it a bit… Initially I just wanted to give it a less starkly-white background. I uploaded it to PicMonkey and started playing, trying different approaches… the turning point was when I tried the Daguerreotype feature, which made it look much more interesting and arty… totally different mood… I fell in love with that – but not enough to leave it as it was, I felt it needed a bit more… colour, that was the first thing that was missing, so I used the Tint feature to colour it blue. And I used the Soften feature to make it a bit less harsh. And then… oh yes, I looked at the image and felt it needed something more, it looked to me like I had this thing floating around in water and there needed to be other stuff in the water, like you get at the bottom of the sea perhaps…

maybe one of the Textures would help? hmmm… this may not seem obvious for an aquatic scene, but Space is the one I used… those little speckles are officially stars, I guess, but hey, whatever works :)

So there you have it – the back story. Hope that didn’t spoil your enjoyment of the end result!

Red Splash

Posted on 3 September, 2013 by Lyagushka (Meirav)

Red Splash by meirav berale

Alternate Universe in Pink, with Cat

Posted on 16 August, 2013 by Lyagushka (Meirav)

Alternative Universe 71/P by Meirav Berale

alternate universe in blue

Posted on 3 August, 2013 by Lyagushka (Meirav)

And now for something completely different…

I did start out with one of my photos, but there’s hardly any trace of the original in the end result. This is what I think of as “painting without paint” – using pixels as art materials and creating a totally abstract image. (I tend to use PicMonkey for that.)