A Work in Progress: lightfuel

This guide was made for entry:
lightfuel
In Contest:
handle with care

Original image

step 1 of 12

Firstly I masked off the shells. At this stage I thought I might use parts of the left-hand shell also so I did them both. To get a good mask I used a copy of the red channel as it had the most contrast, then I used contrast and the burn/dodge tools.

( hi-res )

step 2 of 12

The result after using the mask to delete the background

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step 3 of 12

I opened the background image and deleted the parts marked here by using Content Aware fill

( hi-res )

step 4 of 12

Next I used the dodge tool with a soft brush to brighten the 'light pool' area of the landscape

( hi-res )

step 5 of 12

I duplicated the bright area to it's own layer, set the layer mode to Screen, and used the smudge tool (at various brush size and strength settings) to create this effect

( hi-res )

step 6 of 12

I pasted in and positioned the shell. I then duplicated the shell layer and set the mode of the duplicate to Screen, to brighten it up. I wanted the bottom half to be brighter than the top, so I deleted some of this layer using a large soft brush at low opacity.

( hi-res )

step 7 of 12

At this stage I lightened the background, and the shell to match, and further smudged the 'light pool' layer

( hi-res )

step 8 of 12

Here I added the lightning on it's own [Screen mode] layer, and did yet more smudging of both if and the 'light pool' layer so that they appeared to blend in to each other.

I also used the dodge tool to brighten parts of the bottom of the shell and spines to match the brightness of the light effects.

( hi-res )

step 9 of 12

I wanted the shell and light to be more 'focused' than the rest of the image, so I selected the shaded area, feathered it by about 20px, inverted the selection and used Gaussian blur.

I then used the Blur tool with a soft brush and low Strength to soften the top half of the shell.

( hi-res )

step 10 of 12

At this semi-final stage I decided to delete the uppermost spines.

( hi-res )

step 11 of 12

I decided the image needed to be more dramatic.

I flattened the image, duplicated it, then applied HDR Toning, using settings similar to these. [I flattened and duplicated it because you can only apply the HDR Toning adjustments to a flattened image.)

I then pasted a copy of the pre-HDR-toned image onto another layer, and experiment with different opacities and blend modes of the two layers until I achieved a look I was pleased with.

( hi-res )

step 12 of 12

Final image

( hi-res )

Final result

Votes

user	voted
magicalfruittuts
George55
arifulbk
Gadion
CMYK46
Score: 9.6

Comments

CMYK46 says:

Great SBS, thank you.

(5 years and 2413 days ago)

George55 says:

Interesting image. Good SBS, thanks for sharing it.

(5 years and 2411 days ago)

Pxleyes

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