Thursday Brownies | Chocolate Bars

I decided to share this post this week because I feel bad about something. Of all the time for the typhoon to come, I couldn't understand why it came when I was about to attend an event. Obviously, we (my sister was part of the invitees, too) weren't able to attend because of too much rain, and with two reported road accidents because of the typhoon, I chose our safety over some food tasting and mingling with co-bloggers. :(

The event was for the 1st anniversary of MedChef Cakes by Chef Hasset Go and Paul Jayson Carlos. Apart from the event itself, I was actually looking forward to this event because I could finally meet Madey in person - a blogger whom I met through Multiply circa 2005. Well, I just hope there will be more events so I could finally meet him.

This picture was taken last June when sister and I went to the Mercato Centrale (Bonifacio Global City, Taguig) to pick up my Choconut Mochicko. Sister and I also took the time to roam around and do taste tests (so many delicious foods!), and this picture was taken at MedChef's booth. They have quite a lot of pastries to choose from, but the person manning the store was busy talking to other customers, so we weren't able to ask much about it.

I look forward in coming back to Mercato Centrale because I felt the time we spent there wasn't enough to cover everything.

*** Jenn ***

Edit Me! | Week 02

Welcome to the second week of Edit Me! The image was posted last night (my time), but it was just this morning that I was able to work on the edit.

The SOOC shot was provided by Misty of "Through a Photographer's Eyes." She is also this week's guest judge.

For this image, I was able to do two edits:

As soon as I saw the image, I thought it was like a painting. It also looked a bit vintage-y, so with that I came up with this steps:

• Applied the Vintage Effect action.
• A pass of the Brauer's Warm script set to 25%.
• Applied the Canvas Texture set to multiply at 75%.
• Applied Kim Klassen's Yesteryear texture set to overlay at 50%.

I was actually quite happy with this one, but I thought the canvas texture was quite too strong. I actually was already writing this post when I decided to play with the image again and I came out with this:

This one, I guess is more on the vintage side. This was a very drastic edit because I edited out the houses behind. With this one, I wanted to concentrate more on the wagon. Since it was at the center of the image, I decided to take out the houses to make the image more balanced, since it had more space under.

Steps I made:

• Using the clone tool, I edited out the houses and the itty bitty details - like the electric posts, and the brown things on the lower left side of the image.
• Applied the Vintage Effect action.
• A pass of Brauer's Warm script set to 25%.
• Applied Kim Klassen's Yesteryear texture set to Multiply at 100%.
• Applied Kim Klassen's Sweettart texture set to Soft Light at 75%, just to give it a pinkish tone, since most vintage effect pictures tend to look a bit pinkish.
• Unsharp mask set to 0.75.
• Burn set to Shadow with range of 10.0 and opacity of 100%.

As always, both images were edited using GIMP. I do hope me taking out the houses was okay, I was a bit hesitant in doing that, but I still went with it.

*** Jenn ***

Edit Me! | Week 01

When I went online this morning, I saw Ashley Sisk's take on this meme, and I did find it interesting, but I am still new with the post-processing world, so I was a bit hesitant to join, even if I want to. When my friend Nathalie joined, too, I realized, I shouldn't put on walls in front of me. Like what I said when I commented on her post, "All of us had to start somewhere," so here I am.. joining as well.


The original author of the meme provided the image to be edited, and as soon as I saw it, I knew editing this picture would be difficult because it was already a a beautiful image to begin with, and I don't know if my edit will give justice to the image.

Using GIMP, I came up with this edit. The steps:

• Resized the image to 640x427 pixels, with resolution of 300.
• Gave it a pass of Cooling - Wratten 82 set to 50%, to make the coconut greener and the sky a bit bluer.
• Burn, set to shadow range at 30%
• Added the "Old Paper" texture set to normal at 50%.
• Another pass of the burn filter, still set to shadow range, but with the opacity of 50%.
• To highlight the brown tone of the texture, I also gave it a pass of Brauer's Warm filter set to 25%.
• Finally, added my name stamp using the Jane Austen font.

I am not sure if my edit was good enough, but I hope it is. :)

*** Jenn ***