PP Challenge #19 - THE RESULT

[Donald]

Thanks to everyone who voted in the challenge.

The image that we were all working on, provided by Diane, was at the top of this thread.

And after a week in which the 'lead' changed several times, the winner of the challenge is:

Jeff (Jeff S)

with

And a mention in dispatches to Pete (Pinecone) for Entry No 31 and Estelle (Inspired by Toby) for Entry No 15, who ran Jeff pretty hard for top spot.

Jeff is now invited to put up a post in this thread explaining what he did and how he did it ... and to provide me with a file that we can use in the next Challenge, which will be along in a few days.

[Ken Curtis]

Congratulations, Jeff. Good job.

[Wendy Stanford]

Congratulations, a wonderful conversion Jeff, very realistic, well done

[Jeff S]

Let me start by saying that I am grateful to those who selected this image. It is the first time I’ve ever had the honor to be selected for a monthly contest. I wish I had kept better notes at the time, but never dreamed that they would be needed. What follows is my best recollection of how I put this together.

I also want to give credit where credit is due. I got the idea of this processing from seeing the window that Diane used and the pelican photo that Bobo hung on the wall in last month’s PP Challenge #18. You know what they say about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.



I started with an old rectangular photo of the interior of my home taken last summer, which had never been processed, and cropped it to a more or less square size, by removing a doorway and chair, so that I could emphasize the diagonal lines of the coffee table and the bottom of the glass door, having both of them extend from the bottom corners of the image into the heart of the photograph. I wanted to have the lines lead one’s eye into the room. I also wanted enough of the window showing so I could replace my city/ocean view with the winter scene which is this month’s image.



Next, I processed the interior of the room by straightening the image so the walls would be squared up, and added some curves, a small amount of vibrance and clarity in LR4, removed a light spot from the back wall, and applied a small amount of noise reduction and sharpening. I didn’t save the exact settings because I never expected to need them, but there was nothing unusual about the work done in LR4.

I then transferred the image to Photoshop CS6 where I took the park bench image and reshaped it to match the window opening. Select > All, Edit > Transform > Distort, and then moving the points as far out as I needed to match the shape of the window. This was the first time I had ever experimented with the Distort option, so it took a little doing to get it to line up. I ended up working pretty far outside the original photo’s borders, causing the left side of the bench image to be outside the field of vision when compared to the room image. I then put one image over the other using layers, dimmed the opacity of the room photograph, and fine-tuned the distortion to make sure it all lined up and the horizon was as level as I could make it. When the bench photo matched up with the window, I raised the opacity of the room image and cleaned up any lines between the outdoors scene and the curtains and window frame. I then flattened the image and added some final sharpening and the white border and text.

I hope that is accurate. It's possible that I did a few other small adjustments, but I don't think so. The hardest part was getting the bench scene to line up with the window and curtains without losing too much of the bench scene.

Of course the final photo is a complete fiction since there is never any snow where I live.

[Jeff S]

Thanks, Ken and Wendy.

[Brownbear]

Congratulations Jeff! I was stunned when I viewed your photo because it was so different, imaginative and beautifully edited.

I enjoyed viewing all of the edited entries and was truly mesmerized by everyone's talent in both editing the photo to perfect it and by all of the creative approaches.

[SilverYeou]

So cool! Congratz, Jeff!