Photo chop

Photoshop is a wonderful tool. Very powerful too. It’s like a publishing studio on a PC. I’ve been posting some of my amateur ‘photo manipulations’ lately. They may look simple ..but for me ..they’re not. Some of them were projects that took several hours. Why bother ..? It’s really relaxing and I think it’s actually improving my eyesight (the subject matter helps).

The one titled Geisha punk (March 7, 2006) took a little over 8 hours. Now, for me ..a lot of time is spent just trial and error ‘dithering’ until I get something that looks halfway decent. It was a badly under-exposed original. Almost no color. So, I added green to the background forest and made it look like a watercolor. In order to bring out the model ..I made her face ‘luminescent’ (a word that I’ve recently come to grips with) .. I applied a layer of peach to her hands, arms and feet ..her lips are red thanks to the color burn tool ..I put violet highlights in her hair ..and a transparent shade of purple in her shirt so that you can still see texture and shadow ..the stomach was treated with a lot of lighting effects so you can just make out the navel ..which you couldn’t see at all in the original ..and yes, it actually revealed the top of her panties. I applied a ‘cutout’ effect to give her definition ..then I had to ‘blend’ her back into the ‘forest’ ..and fill an ugly sandbox with pond water and lilies.

By contrast, the one titled ‘Rainforest’, which I think looks a lot nicer ..took only about 10 minutes. That’s because I had a great digital rainforest to begin with ..given to me by a friend who I have yet to credit (my apologies DB). All I had to do was put someone in it. I teased a model off another photo and applied shades of copper until she ‘blended in’. I was really doing it to practice using the color gradient tool ..but since I’ve been such a slacker lately with my journal writing ..I posted it instead.