The longer we live with digital imagery, the more amazing the opportunities become to turn photographs into more abstract and subjective imagery than the “objectivity” of pure, untouched photography could ever provide. Now, we have more and more powerful stacking algorithms, layers and smart layers, automatically masked adjustment layers that can be painted, and can combine artistic effects…to mention only a fraction of the power in our hands.
To eliminate the lettering in the background, I made the background’s color the Brush Tool’s Foreground color by choosing the Brush Tool and then pressing Opt/Alt. The cursor turns to an eyedropper and you just click on the color you want to be your foreground color. Photoshop’s ability to let you zoom in to exact pixels makes it easy to take out even the exact colors between little strands of hair.
Next, I made another layer and named it Retouch and used the Healing tools to clean up the normal skin “glitches.” Not that they were so noticeable, but some of the art techniques I might use later might grab and exaggerate them. Remember that I said that later on when we do those things. I’m not going to show you a shot of that layer because the changes are too subtle to be very noticeable in this case.
I wanted to see the subject on a new and more dramatic background. There are countless ways to do that. I thought, for this one, I’d have some “spotlights” shining into the lens. So I clicked the New Layer icon, named it Background, and filled it with black. Then I used Render > Lighting Effects and put different colored omnidirectional lights on the background in positions I thought would “overlap” the model in the finished product. Like this:
There are many techniques for putting the main image into a different background. The most common of these…and certainly applicable in a good many instances, is to use a selection to lift the subject from the background or to use the Extract filter to take the subject out of the background. I didn’t do either in this case because I wanted the “look” to be a little less “finished” and a little more “arty.” So I made a copy of the image layer and then used Image > Adjustments > Threshold on the copy. I named the layer Threshold.
In the dialog I just moved the slider until everything in the image was either black or white. If there’s anything inside the image that’s should be black but isn’t, just use the Brush tool to paint it black. Theoretically, you can get a near perfect mask that way, but I wasn’t even trying. Instead, I just used the Gaussian blur filter to soften the edges of the mask so a “halo” would appear around her head. Later, I found the halo to be too pronounced, so I just took a nice, soft brush and painted around the layer mask in black. You can see the exact effect if you have the Mask rectangle selected (a square frame appears around it when you click on it). If you don’t like what you do, push X and the color will reverse and you can paint to reverse what you did. After a fair amount of “fooling around” you’ll get exactly the effect you want. Here’s the model blended with the background as I felt it would work for the “look” I wanted, but keep in mind that what you might want to do could be entirely different.
I wanted to use another graphic element and tried a dragon drawing I’d shot at the same festival, but in this case, I just couldn’t make it work. So I found a Sunset nature shot of a tree I’d made a few years ago and copied and pasted it as a layer into the same image. I named the layer Tree, then experimented with Blend Modes (press Shift and + repeatedly) and settled for Overlay. There were too many branches in front of her face, so I added a mask to the layer and painted in dark gray over her face until there was only a suggestion of those branches. Here’s where we are so far:
Now, here comes the fun part: I wanted to turn the whole composite I’d done so far into something that look more like an impressionistic pop art painting. I could have used any of the programs or filters that make an image look like a water-color, abstract, comic book, or what-have-you. In this case, I used a Photoshop Filter called Plastic Wrap and spent lots of time playing with the settings. I also used the Hard Light Blend Mode (always a good idea to experiment here, too) and then reduced the overall opacity of that layer. You see the final result below:
If you love this rendition as much as I do…or any of the others shown below, you can buy a 16 X 24 inch print that is an artists proof at that size for $100. Just send me an email and I’ll send you the link to order it from. If you wish, you can also order framing in a variety of very elegant styles at very reasonable prices. A whole series of 6 4′ X 6′ signed and numbered limited edition prints signed and numbered are available for gallery exhibitions at $4,000 each, retail. Of course you can order one of the limited edition prints, too, if you like. Just email me: ken@kenmilburn.com and I’ll give you complete instructions for secure ordering and shipping with payment through PayPal.
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