Tweaking . . .

This afternoon I've been working on tweaking the image from my last post. Here it is again:

I want to use it as a sample book cover in my portfolio. I decided it isn't quite up to the standard I want to project.  It's a little too heavy on the dark green.

This is where I love working digitally.

I went back into my original Photoshop document, which I had saved unflattened.  In my "wash" layer, I erased the dark green off the shutters and repainted them with the putty colors of the window frames.  I easily captured the same colors with my color picker tool.  Then I lightened the rectangle in which my name appears by selecting it and filling the selection with a semitransparent light yellow green.  In the scratch board layer, I scraped away some of the weight of the black lines around the window panes with the eraser tool.

Here's how it looks now:

I think the lightening of the window area has created a bit of an illusion that the characters were lightened too.  I didn't touch them this round. Hmm. Interesting effect.  I am happier now.

On another, more exciting note, I have ordered myself a copy of Painter 12 software.  It's on sale half off.  A bargain not to be missed!  The only thing worrying me is that I don't have a super powerful computer.  It's about five years old, running Windows Vista.  When I'm using Photoshop, all other windows are closed.  I optimize the computer after every digital drawing session.  Last Friday I cleaned out old high res files I'll never need again.  Yet, I still run into sluggishness when I'm working with a lot of layers.  I want to be able to draw quickly, without having to wait a second for my line to appear on the screen.  I'm afraid adding another high grade art software will freeze up this old machine.  Maybe Santa will bring me a new PC with a 6+ GB hard drive and 1 TB of memory.  He brought me my Intuos 4 tablet last year.  Here's hoping!

What new art tools are you wishing for?