Associative Agony

This 365 project I am working on is giving me fits.  The word for this last week was 'scrub'.  As soon as the word hit my brain, the word 'brush' was permanently attached to it.  To the point that at one point I was taking photographs of hair brushes, having totally lost the real word.  Delightful.  Not only do I have earworms on a regular basis, I also can't keep a simple word from mutating.  'Why do you have a photo of the edge of a beaver pond?' ask the puzzled YD.  Echo answered.  I also 'photoshopped' that photo to increase the contrast and saturation.

That exercise lead me to start playing with some of my water photos ( I use Corel PhotoPaint10, btw, not Photoshop), with the results shown below.

009/365  -  this is a view of one of the bridges on the Columbia River, cropped and with the blue values enhanced.

010/365 - this is also a view of the Columbia River from the Washington State side, taken the same day, contrast enhanced.

011/365.  Now I am really playing.  Here is another of the sunset photos from Opinicon Lake, fiddled with a tool that Corel calls 'embossing', with the major colour value selected as the taupe. (Just found a double number.  This is old 10 in Sue's comment.)

012/365.  A more traditional YF in her canoe shot, this one tweaked to strengthen the greens in the reflection.  Corel has a feature called 'auto equalize' that I used for this.  I also cropped the photo from landscape (horizontal) to vertical.

013/365.  The same shot, embossed, but with the original colours intact.  Red canoes make wonderful photo subjects.

014/365.  Yet another YF (and dog) in canoe, this one reimaged with  a PhotoPaint10 tool that edits the image into a watercolour, with various values and brushstrokes that you can set.  I love this tool and use it a lot.  I've left the colour alone in this attempt.

Brush strokes, from scrubbrush, scrubbing being a technique you can use with watercolour.  Sigh.  It's a reach, and I know it.

015/365.  This time the YD and her faithful companion have had all the colour replaced by shades of grey, and the result equalized.  The fact that YD and dog were slightly out of focus, as I had a single focal point centred on the front of the canoe (don't do this a dusk; use multiple points or a bracket focus) is now disguised.