Never one to pass on a possible learning experience, I decided to take some of my ho-hum photos from this weekend’s getaway to Mystic Seaport and jazz them up in Photoshop—an exercise I rarely have the pleasure of enjoying since most of my Photoshop work involves simple cropping, adjusting light balance and the occasional application of gaussian blur. So after reframing these images and checking light balance, I got to work on the fun part.

In this first shot of the Emma C. Berry I adjusted the image from RGB to black and white and then added a berry colored elipse layer with 12 percent opacity on top.

For this image of three rowboats I applied the brushstrokes filter called crosshatch after making some adjustments to lightness and contrast with a visit to the levels panel and then using the curves tool.

I played with different gradient maps on the Nellie before settling on this warm orange, magenta and navy tritone. Wow, like so surreal, man.

And I’m sorry to say, for the life of me, I can not remember what I did to create this somewhat painterly effect on the lone rowboat. A bummer because of all the effects I used, this one’s hands down my favorite. No choice! I’ll have to spend some more time playing to figure out what I did.

All images were optimized for web as JPGs using the Save for Web & Devices feature in Photoshop at a setting of medium, high or very high depending on resulting quality and file size. And then dropped into ImageOptim for a final wringing out of any loose and unnecessary pixels.

Remember to do something fun this week!

Mary Maru