Your June calendar freebie

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to visit The Textile Museum of Canada. I had only been there once before and that was ages ago. Photographs are permitted, with the only rule being "no flash", so I opted to experiment and use only my iPhone as I walked around, instead of the traditional camera buried in the bottom of my purse. It was truly an experiment as the lighting is quite subdued and I was unsure if I would get any quality shots. I am pleased to report that overall I was quite happy with my photos. So happy, in fact, that I decided to use one of those images to create June's calendar page. Here's the original photograph, before the playfulness began:

I brought this iPhone photo into Photoshop and then played around with it before adding the smudged orange edge and the calendar info. The image altering included a substantial curves adjustment as well as utilizing both the poster edges and cutout filters, at a very low opacity.

Did you know you could lower the opacity of a filter? This is one of those hidden gems in Photoshop. Unfortunately, I don't believe this works in Photoshop Elements and I'm not sure it even works in earlier versions of CS (I have CS4). I'd appreciate knowing if your version of PS supports this so, if you give this a try, please let me know the results. Here's the how-to: immediately after applying a filter, go straight to your Edit menu and you will see the Fade command near the top. This not only lets you reduce the opacity of the filter you just applied, but also lets you apply a blending mode to it as well. Neat, eh?

As always, please click on the calendar image at the top or click HERE to get your copy. Just click on the All Sizes link where you can choose your download size (I recommend Original).