Photoshop Friday::heavy balloons and weightless me.

Posted by Tiff in Photography | 2 comments

It’s true, I’m totally obsessed with Photoshop. And not even the actual photoshop…Adobe and I are in frustrating phone conversations back and forth over whether I do or do not qualify for the ‘student and teacher’ discount so I can get a code to use the software for $199 rather than $900+. I’m confident my unschooling charms will win them over in the long run, but there’s not much more mind numbing than going up the chain of command to find someone reasonable. So, I’m actually using Adobe Elements 6 with the goal of upgrading to photoshop soon!

Photoshop is this fun little program that lets anyone manipulate pictures however they want. It’s responsible for keeping the beauty and fashion industry au courant due to the airbrushing/shrinking/lengthening you can do with it. My skills with it are basic, I’m teaching myself as I go, and so I’m no good at the parts that would make me taller or smoother. I use it mostly to tell a story that I’m thinking in my head.

Like, yesterday, while out exploring my new hood here in Orange I came across a dollar store selling mylar balloons filled with helium. So I bought 6 red hearts for the kids and me and Frito. And one left over. Because I cannot count. Anyway. The balloons were floating in my room, and I started thinking, it would be fun to make the balloons fall and me float. And so that’s what I set out to do. Here’s a little behind the scenes look at how to go about doing this.

First, I break the scene down. There’s the room. The balloons. Me. I wanted to literally change places with the balloons, so they were on the ‘ground’ and I was on the ‘ceiling’. To do this, I need to layer a few different pictures on top of each other. I anchor the camera in one place–never to move it before I’m done upon pain of death–set the focus and then lock it so it can’t refocus until I’m done.

Then I take the pictures. One of the room (this will be a blank canvas that I layer the other pictures on):

Some of the balloons floating around in different places. I’m in the shot, but it doesn’t matter because I just copy and paste the balloons I want, so I’ll never be seen:

Then, I take pictures of me in the position I want to be in. You notice I’ve taken off my pants so my long shirt is now either a tunic or short dress. I find legs to be really expressive and would rather see them than pants. Everyone has their thing. Brooke Shaden loves expressive backs. So, anyhow, I ditch my pants and I take a few shots so I can pick and choose from the best:

This shot is deceptively simple (I thought) because all it entails (I thought) was putting the balloons and me in one shot and then rotating it around so the balloons are on the bottom and I’m on the top. So I did that, got it rotated, cloned out the sliver of doorway that was distracting, added in some drop shadows, blended some elements together, played around with the color curves…

href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/childplay/5416119865/” title=”IMG_9495 by childplay {Tiffani}, on Flickr”>

And Golfer walked by and said, “It’s totally obvious you’re on the floor, Mom. Why didn’t you put yourself on the ceiling?” And then I said, “Dammit!” No, I didn’t. I just thought it. Because he was right. So I started all over again, this time putting me on the ceiling and the balloons on the floor. I have to do this in steps, mostly because I hobble together different arms and legs and torso’s so here I am without arms…but on the ceiling/floor!

then the balloons/shadows:

then I flipped it, and did all the cloning/fine tuning/adding textures (stopping to turn the two floating balloons upside down per request from Naturalist, who thought they looked cooler looking like they were floating down):

And then finally, finally! After tweaking the color curves some more, I have my final shot…looking pretty much like how I was thinking of it in my head:

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