June 2021 - Holly on the bench

Now here’s another garden photo that could only exist because of Photoshop. The back of the garden swing bench isn’t printed with a young holly branch – although that would be rather nice. (Although, come to think of it, you might think twice before leaning back!).

I had taken a photo of the seat back – rather hoping to see a nice abstract image. Sadly, there wasn’t one, at least not one that I thought was halfway usable. And I had also taken a few photos of the holly growing in our garden. It grows in all sorts of places, but this particular one had chosen to live within the Quince bush providing even more protection to the sparrows who nest in it.

I then cropped the holly picture and selected just the holly branch. And cut out all the surrounding leaves and things. I find this sort of selection quite hard – very easy to make an approximate selection but when you look at the cut out you can still see where I hadn’t been precise, and this makes the picture look a bit stupid. Fortunately, Photoshop has a (for me) really essential tool – ‘Select Subject’. This selects what it thinks is the main subject in the photo and it is usually pretty good at doing that. In this case it was more than pretty good – it was well nigh perfect. So, I cut out the holly, and then placed it, in Photoshop, on top of the back of the swing seat. And there you are!

It’s one of the joys of Photoshop that you can do all sorts of creative work on photos with a lot of help from the tools that it provides. I don’t think that this one is particularly artistic, but I did enjoy the creative process!