Something I have never tried before – setting up my camera to take an overhead shot. Fortunately my lens was wide enough to get everything in the frame (mostly) but I did have to tie the tripod to a doorhandle to stop it tipping over with the very heavy camera suspended way out to the limit of the center pole. Plus we had a couple of small earthquakes while I was doing it!
Two new things were tried in this image, the overhead angle and I also had my first go at blending in extra fabric which was quite challenging. It wasn’t til the image was finished that I noticed how the swirly element had been duplicated rather obviously 😦
Oh well, these images are ALL ABOUT THE LEARNING, there are many mistakes here but each time I learn so much more 🙂
This time I was much happier with the colour tonings, I understood a lot better what I was trying to achieve and am much happier with the finished product. Need to have some variation away from the blues and purples tho!
This is the original starting image so you can see the huge difference, here are the processing steps:
- Make canvas bigger
- Copy blank carpet shot and fill in expanded canvas
- Put in main subject image (above)
- Bring in extra fabric options on separate layers, warp into place and touch up with masking
- Select fabric elements as one whole selection and recolour and mask out colour bleed
- Desaturate whole image
- Select hair and brighten and contrast
- Add some darker vignettes
- Add some shadow under the edge of the fabric
- Do THE MOVE – CTL SHIFT ALT E to compress all layers into one blended one but retains all layers underneath
- Tweak over all colour channels via curves
- Brighten up the left side a bit
- Denoise heavily
- Add a texture and mask off skin
As always feedback is welcome, I am still learning this process so any tips and tricks etc welcome.
What does this image say to you, what is its story?
Learning to See Light 
Excellent work 🙂
So good to see the processes undergone… thank you for sharing 🙂
Thankyou, up til now my process has been a bit all over the place, but this time I was better set to follow a more structured path.
Great photos. I love the way your face is not seen, but the tattoo is. So which face to present to the world. It is always hard starting out from scratch and going in the right direction. Well done
thankyou, not much I can do about the tattoo either way 🙂
Stacey, I’m so enjoying watching your progress and results through these images. I can imagine soooo much work goes into each one. Equal amounts of learning too!
Are you enjoying it? Sure looks like it.
Some are more complicated than others but yes, this one was at least an hours worth of shooting, and then a good two hours of editing. I am getting a bit faster each time but its unlikely to ever get below a couple of hours of editing time. Yes i am enjoying it, can be frustrating when it doesn’t come off how it was intended, but always fail forward, and its not failure if you learn something 🙂
So true! 😀
Wow – this is superb! Congratulations, your work is inspiring. 🙂
THANKYOU, it’s lovely to hear that
Lovely work. It is great to see an idea come to fruition