here is a photo of my best friends two oldest daughters i thought i would make a little cuter by doing some photoshop tricks that i have picked up over the years.
picking the right photo goes a long way. if you have an eye to do it, you are halfway there.
abigail on the the left and ruth on the right are so different in their personalities and i thought that this photo captured their personalities perfectly. different shapes and colors capture their spirit and their attitudes are captured in their stance inside the objects they have drew.
what i did first was double the dpi and the size and turn it into a cmyk from an rgb and cropped off the black.
then i cleaned up ruths shirt a bit
then i cut the girls out with the lasso and changed gamma, contrast, brightness, and saturation on each girl
here is them placed back into the image spiffed up a bit
realizing that i could stay on this step for hours cutting each picture perfectly i decided to just blur the edges a bit to finalize the image to fit back in with the minimum of "tells"
i wanted to crop the extra bricks to ruths left, but since i do not know the actual photographer, i figured i would let their eye tell their shot.
so it looked great but then i wanted to place a theme type mask over the whole thing and i figured lens flare would do the trick nicely.
i had to move the actual flare off-shot to allow for the natural sunlight to have it's power in the shot.
this is what i consider the final cleanup and the photo, in my mind, looks great.
so this is done.
now you can change color or blur or add some extreme vibrancy. here are some examples...
black and white
guassian blur
vibrancy
texture light
and of course you can always change the perspective
skew
reverse bubble
and then you can always choose to get really artistic. i had around twenty of these. here are the best ones.
and then finally, you can take these images you've created and do something else... like sell a website.
have fun out there!
