A few weeks ago, I was approached by the Sleeklens.com PR Relations Manager (Jane Grates) asking me to try their overlays. They provide a number of great overlays for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Her offer was simple. In exchange for a free set of overlays, I’d have to use them and comment about it the experience on my website. So here goes….

Here is my honest moment. I’m okay at photography and using Adobe Photoshop, but I don’t consider myself great at it. Photoshop is an amazingly powerful software package, where I probably know how to use 5 percent of it. I always feel frankly like a weak Photoshop user. So when Jane asked me to use their overlays and comment on the process, I was sure she contacted the wrong person. But I also felt very honored Sleeklens contacted me.

So I accepted her offer and accepted a set of sky overlays. They have a number of different types. I watched a few of the Sleeklens’ “how to” videos on Youtube.com and then tried a few of them on one of my photos.

Tonight I am sharing four photos with you. One is the original photo, as I took it in Valletta, Malta. I loved the location, subject matter, and composition. But during my limited time there, the sky was ugly. Therefore, I wasn’t very happy with the photo. It seemed like the perfect photo to try these Overlays with and I created 3 photos using 3 different sky overlays from Sleeklens. I’m sharing them all with you, just so you get an idea of how they look and the impact they have on the photo.

Not being a great Photoshop user, after watching the videos I found them extremely easy to use. So it wasn’t difficult to use them or make them look good.

I don’t know how often I’ll use them, since I don’t often modify the subject matter of my photos that much. I often use my raw images to create HDR images, which enhances the color, but I don’t often remove entire portions of the photo and replace it with something that wasn’t there. It just isn’t part of my normal thinking, when processing images. That’s probably because my photos are visual reminders of my actual experiences. I create them because it helps me remember what I saw and felt when I was standing there in real life. They’re flash cards from our travels and experiences. Ways to share my memories with you. So replacing the sky with an alternative sky, would change what I experienced.

But I can see why photographers would love these. Some amazing photographers do all kinds of cool things in Photoshop to create amazing images. So if you’re looking for overlays, the Sleeklens overlays are great and easy to use. I might not use them much, for the reason I listed above. But they’re great. Check out their website at http://www.sleeklens.com