In this piece we started with a regular photograph (far left) in photoshop. Retouching blemishes, blurring skin, darkening and lightening hot spots (middle).
Next we take the touched up photo to painter and start cloning, i used oil cloners mostly, i left a brush stroke look on the outside to eliminate the background distractions. I wasn’t totally satisfied with some details so i took the final painter image back into photoshop, and put the (middle shot) as a layer on top. I masked in certain areas around the mouth, eyes and nose i wanted to be photographic crisp. I finished off by cleaning the reflections on the eyes.

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Here is the same case study, new fruit and new application. This digital painting was done using the photograph in the top left. This time i used only photoshop, and it’s brushes.
I accidentally flatted the initial sketch sorry!
Then you can see i blocked in the basic colours with a size size 60 brush at about 60% opacity 100% hardness. The file size was 8″x8″ 300dpi.

After i lowered the brush opacity to 20% to blend the colours and often used a smaller size 30 brush, still 100% hardness. Keep sampling the blended overlapping colours and brush till you are get a nice gradient.

For a finishing touch i applied a texture to the brush to get a fuzzy, spotted look on some highlights. I never used any blur, smudge, dodge or burn tools at all.

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Advanced photoshop competition for the website worth1000.com
It had been awhile since i submitted anything and i had some free time.
This topic was about making those elusive bigfoot evidence photo’s you always see, but this time its real!
Any fictitious monster you like, but it must have been been claimed to be real at some point in history.
I choose dragons. I took an everyday sky shot i found from my own personal collection and started by enhancing the clouds. I dropped in a black silhouette of a flying dragon and toyed with layer styles, visibility and blur until i got a desired look. I masked out the part where the sky was showing. Then using the same mask, filled in those areas with dragon skin i borrowed from lizards/ alligators and bats.
The result was a dragon that was trying to stay out of sight in the clouds, but when the sun hit down, it exposed his terrifying shadow in the clouds.

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I was recently looking through some photo’s off-loaded from my digital camera when a friends birthday party showed up. I thought this picture was a good pose but there was plenty wrong with the picture’s qualities.
The subject is blown out, too red, red eye’s, colour washed out, distracting background.
I started by cropping the shot to center on the birthday boy, and blurring the background a touch.
Whitened up the teeth, neutralized the blacks in his hair and shirt as well as darkening them with curves.
Used curves, selective colour and some darkening brush to bring back the detail in his face.

Lastly i applied lots of sharpening to the foreground, and more around the face and eyes to really create a focal point.

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Worth1000.com is a website that offers users to participate in competitions against one another. In one contest the goal was to make a something invisible. It’s best to choose an image that creates a funny or interesting result by the removal of an object.
Here was my submission.

I found the backpack especially difficult, as there wasn’t much existing material to work with. Anything the head covered had to be recreated. After a lot of cloning, and touching up i was happy with the result.

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Here is a larger Panorama taken at Niagra falls from a castle like structure above the line up to “maid of the mist”. It includes both Canadian falls, American Falls as well as some foreground and side structure.
What i find most amazing about these shots is how much more it feels like being there. Our eyes interpret so much more than just the square box in front of them, enter the age of widescreen LCD’s.

This time around i decided to include the original pictures i took before merging and editing. Besides some colour tweaking, i took out a few people who i felt were blocking the view. This one is roughly 62 inches wide at full size length. It’s so large in fact if you zoom in, you can make out people climbing the American waterfall from both sides.

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