Saturday, November 24, 2012

Photographs Digitally Altered


"Break Away"
This image is available to purchase in prints here:  My Artist Website

This image started as a photograph--a motion shot that I took of a neighbor running back to her house in a new dress that someone recently made for her.  I caught her in the moment and something about it reminded me of Cinderella or Alice in Wonderland, so I spent a few hours in photoshop and here’s what I came up with.  

Now to break it down step by step:

For those who are familiar with photoshop and are just curious about my approach, needless to say, it was very experimental.  I started off by making a quick selection of the girl running and then fine tuning it.  I inversed the image and then began working on covering the car and street with the clone tool.  I realize this is considered an old fashioned technique now, but I enjoy having some control over the placement of things as I copied and pasted parts of the grass and trees. I used the softest brush option with about 90 percent opacity/flow and made my placements with a path in mind.  Then I used the soft brush and a low opacity to paint a path (taking the color from a light area in the trees).  I used a textured brush and added some spots alongside the path to create flowers.  Finally, I added some lighting effects (go to Filter; Render; Lighting effects) and used a default spotlight, angling it on my path.  I added a lens flare (also found under Render) that started behind the trees, and voila.  Of course, I did lots of experiments before choosing the final route.  I played with the colors through different adjustment layers and I changed the textures of the girl’s surroundings with different filters.  I know this is all in a nutshell, so if you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer.  

Here is the image before I made the path. 

I toyed around with colors before I decided on the final image.  I was debating on the path looking more like fog.  What do you think?

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