Thank you, Rick, for this opportunity!

I've been on several workshops with Rick this year, the most recent one being in Iceland. What a beautiful country and awesome experience. I can't wait to go back!

One of the first places we visited in Iceland was a huge area where fresh fish are hung out on wooden racks and dried as part of the process in making fish paste for cooking.

All you chefs know what I'm talking about. This area was quite interesting—but what do you do with photos of dead fish? Well, if you're a digital photo artist, you experiment in Photoshop of course!

Rick asked me to share the processing steps that took this original image (opening image) to the final one I have named “Fish Head Art”.

I am using Adobe Photoshop in Creative Cloud. The first step after making minor adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw was to go into Nik Filters and browse through the presets in Silver Efex Pro 2.

My thinking was that a black and white version of this image would be more appealing. I chose the Underexposed preset and added a blue filter from the right side of the dialog box.

I also increased the Structure from within the same dialog box to 75. After applying the filter, I cycled through the Blending Modes in the Layers Panel in Photoshop until I got to Difference and left it at the default of 100%

I liked the effect, but felt the image had more potential. I duplicated the layer (Control/Command J), changed the Blend Mode in the Layers Panel from Normal to Difference again and left it at 100%

As a final touch I went back into Nik Filters to Color Efex Pro, then to Image Borders in the Presets. I chose Border 12, adjusted the width and applied it. And that was the birth of “Fish Head Art”

I had a lot of fun with this image, but there were certainly more beautiful scenes from Iceland that I didn't have to “transform”.

Below is one of my favorites--brilliant ground cover with a glacier in the background.

If you'd like to take a look at more of my images, please visit my website.

Thank you again, Rick. You always make learning fun on your workshops.