Red Monkey: A River Runs On It

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A River Runs On It

February 4, 2008

Here's my silly entry for Chica X's photo manipulation contest:

We're supposed to also give the process we used to create our rendition of the pic. So, first I duplicated the original image and locked the original layer so that I would always have the original to fall back on when I screwed it up. (Trust me, it's inevitable that you will screw up a layer beyond the ability to Cmd-Z it.) Then I played with filters. I like to use either Dry Brush or Cut Out to give a certain flair to some images. Cut Out looked like crap, not that I was surprised with the levels of intricacy on this photo, but I tried anyway. I wound up using Dry Brush. Then, I made another copy of the original layer and moved it to the top. I deleted the Red and Green channels to leave a nice grey photo. Then I began erasing bits of the bridge so that the colour would show through.

After that tedious bit of insanity was done, I went looking for a large image of a river. I used the Magic Wand selector to select the muddy bit of the bridge and then pasted the river image into that selection. I did a bit of adjusting, some healing brush to take some things out ... painted the mask a little differently to pick some other things up. Finally I used a drop shadow with a lot of noise to dirty up the banks a little more and then a bevel (direction = down) to give a bit of shoreline.

Had I more time, I'd have done a better job with erasing a bit more of the greyscale bridge, but the diamond patterning on the fence just made this too time-consuming to bother with. I would have liked to have had the kayakers and the hiker more in scale as well, but again ... just too time-consuming with this particular shot.

All in all, a fun little project. Thanks, Chica X!

Posted by Red Monkey at February 4, 2008 10:51 AM | | | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble |