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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great SBS, thank you.
(5 years and 2382 days ago)Interesting image. Good SBS, thanks for sharing it.
(5 years and 2381 days ago)