More Early French Republic Fashion Plates for MEN

Costume Parisien, An. 7.

Costume Parisien, An. 7

Costume Parisien: Men

Costume Parisien An.11

Costume Parisien, very early pub. 1797.

Frenchmen Fashion Plates, Empire

Here are a couple of sexy Frenchmen one of whom seem to be in quite a hurry.

Costume Parisien 1807

Costume Parisien Fashion Plate

A couple from 1814. Gentleman looks like Cary Grant!

Costumes Parisien, 1814

A couple more fashion prints from Costumes Parisien, these with couples. Funny mixture of formal & informal.  That is, who would wear a straw hat and carry a parasol to a Ball?  But maybe that was the fashion then!

Costume Parisien Empire Fashion Plate

French Empire Fashion Plate

While looking thru my files for scans that might make a nice "Regency Valentine's Day Card" I found nested file-within-file a folder labeled "MISC Scans". Full of gorgeous scans, mostly of French fashion plates. So I am looking forward to hours of nit-picky photoshop fun.  Heh.

Georgette Heyer Valentine's Day Card: Powder & Patch

Regency Valentine's Day Card: Jane Austen Pride & Prejudice

Regency Valentines Day Card. Darcy's proposal to Elizabeth

Georgette Heyer: These Old Shades for Valentine's Day

I'm feeling kind of 'meh' today, colors seem washed-out. We had a very pretty snow from last night which meant a "late" day for school. Fun. Then it warmed up a couple of degrees and began drizzling- melted the pretty snow.  So I decided to play around with my favorite Heyer Book Cover, the Pan paperback edition:

"Monseigneur, I would much rather be the last woman then the first."
"Little one," he said very low "since you will stoop to wed me, I pledge you my word that you shall not in the future have cause to regret it."

Photoshop Ice Sculpture

Making A Clear (Ice or Crystal-like)

Object in Photoshop Elements

 1.     Find a picture you’d like to convert.  Like a Regency Mail Coach.

2.    Select & save selected item in foreground, delete background. Best to have individual selections of different parts, such as “selection of horses”, “Selection of Coach WHEELS”, “selection of coach w/o wheels”, “Selection of People”, so you can control the amount and direction of light source.

3.   Use “Sharpen” filter for details you want to be prominent.  Use “Reduce Noise” filter, and/or eraser to smooth out areas you want to look smooth & icy.

4.   Set your pallet Background Color to Dark Ice-Blue/light blue, or Black/light grey. It doesn’t matter what color is on top of pallets.

5.    Select objects.  In this case I just selected the horses.

 6.   Go to “Sketch” filter and apply “Bas Relief”, with “detail” at max and the “smoothness” feature adjusted to your preference (about 1/3 of the way up the scale for this picture).  Use “left” or “right” light-source to highlight.  Other light sources (upper left, bottom, etc) don’t seem to work too well.

 









7.    When you’ve made the whole drawing into a “Bas Relief”, duplicate it 2 times.   Make the 2 top layers invisible.

8.  On your LAYERS Pallet, select the bottom layer (#1) of the Bas Relief Object. Go to the upper right corner of the LAYERS pallet and check “Luminosity” filter. Leave “opacity” at 100% for now.  Later you can adjust it to 75-85% if needed.

 9.   Leave the “Luminosity” layer visible.

10.  Select the layer directly above the “Luminosity” layer (layer 2). 

11. Go to upper right menu on this LAYERS pallet and click on “Screen” if your background is dark.  Slide the opacity scale to about 50% or lower, depending on how much transparent area you want.  This works best with darker backgrounds. This will lighten the already light areas as well as make translucent areas.  If you want completely transparent area you can simply erase or delete the area. 

11b.  If your background will be light, use the "Darken" mode along with adjusting opacity down.

12.  Place a colorful image in the Background.  I chose an old map of England.

13. Here is the stage-coach with a different background:

14.  To add some rainbow-sparkle, SELECT the 3^rd (so far unused) stage coach layer.

15. Go to the “Effects” menu/pallet.  Chose a highly   colorful spectrum Effect.  I chose “Nebula” for this sample, tho I don’t think the latest Photoshop Elements has it (I’m still using #6).

 16.  Lower the OPACITY to around 15-25%.  This can go under or over the other stagecoach filters, whichever looks best to you.

So the important filters to use in making an object

translucent are:  Sketch/Bas Relief, "Luminosity" and/or 

"Screen" or "Darken" with very low (about 15%) Opacity.

 After than you can do anything.