Silver Christening & Birthstone Charms

I have only made one so far, but have been playing with a rather lovely new computer program called Lightroom, which I discovered allows me to select small areas of a photograph and "paint" new colour over them. Amazing! And so much easier than Photoshop.

So, this here is the original photograph, with a ruby for July:

Some deepening of the colour gets us to this, which is garnet, for January. Still red, just a little darker, so not that impressive, you might think...


...but check this out! Desaturating, upping the exposure then painting layers of semi-transparent purple colours gets us a pretty accurate rendering of an amethyst, birthstone for February:

And so on. We have aquamarine for March...

Diamond for April...

Emerald for May...

Sadly, June is still missing, as the birthstone is a pearl, and even the fabulousness that is Lightroom can't turn a faceted stone into a smooth and even coloured pearl. Booooo.

But, we have peridot for August...

Sapphire for September...


Opal for October...

Citrine for November...

And finally, blue topaz for December.

Sadly, Adobe will only let you have a 30 day free trial of Lightroom. Booooo. Something to do with them wanting you to actually pay for the program or something...

But, I love it so much that I may well do that. Maybe. When I have some spare cash...