Photo Friday - Serenity

Today's photo Friday is a little special. After a stressful few weeks both Katie and I needed to hear the Serenity Prayer. Hope this brings you some peace, too.

Interesting thing, this picture was taken on church grounds.

• Had some friends copy out the Serenity prayer in their own handwriting.
• Scanned the prayers into the computer.
• Placed the scanned images into Photoshop, erased all space around the words (i.e. the image of the paper the prayers were written on). 
• Replaced black or blue (depending on the color ink each person used) with white
• Opened the rose picture in Photoshop.  
• Used the magnetic lasso tool to "go around" the outline of the rose (not the hips, ONLY the bud), and copy and paste it into its own layer.
• Heightened the saturation of the "background image" (the original image behind the rose bud).  I left the saturation on the rose bud alone, otherwise it would have been luridly yellow.  I thought it was just yellow enough--a beautiful color.  The only reason I heightened the saturation on the background was because it almost made it look like an abstract pastel or watercolor piece to me--such beautiful colors for a background.
• Used the sponge tool to go around the edges of the rose bud copy so that it wouldn't stand out so much from the original image of the rose bud underneath.
• Placed the prayers one-by-one onto the background and arranged them to cover the entire background with writing.
• Lowered the opacity on the prayers, so that you could see through them (basically made them translucent).  Because I put the rose bud on its own layer, the bud sat on top of the prayers while the prayers sat on top of the background--I sandwiched the prayers between the background and the bud.
• Went back to the original images of the prayers and grabbed the lines from each that I wanted.  Copied and pasted onto a top layer, and re-sized to be bigger than the background prayers.
• Heightened the contrast on the big words to make them as white as possible, and went around the words with the eraser to get rid of some of the garbage that didn't get "magic erased" in the original prayer editing.  This was an especially difficult step, as I wanted to maintain the character of each person's individal handwriting, but I also wanted it to look good.  This may not make sense, but it's pretty difficult to scan and copy and paste things as intricate as handwriting--lots of little wiggles in the lines that come out funny in pixels.  I think if I could find a better way to do this, that would be awesome.  Advice from anybody who knows how to do this is welcome!
• Put a drop shadow on all the big words so that they would stand out more from the prayers and from the image itself.