Shy moth part 3 ~ colours and textures galore.

[JBW]

[Shadowman]

Revealed very nicely.

[JBW]

Revealed very nicely.

agreed

[ajohnw]

Don't know Brian it looks too contrasty to me. Hard to reduce that completely due to the blacks.



John
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[JBW]

Don't know Brian it looks too contrasty to me. Hard to reduce that completely due to the blacks.



John
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Tough call, to me both versions have their strong points. I like the touch of mystrium in mine but yours has some very nice detail.

[ajohnw]

I adjusted the contrast with an inverted desaturated copy and soft light and also a bit if use of the centre pointer in levels on the original. This also bought up the tail end of the moth more which is a bit out of focus.

To fix the focus I used a sharpening layer, FX-Foundry-Photo-Sharpen-BSSS sharpening. It can be very useful. I then selected that layer shift clicked on it's eye so that I could see it and using a very very large brush painted the other end of the moth and the whole image out of it in black. Then shift clicked on it's eye again to restore the entire view again and ran a fair sized brush over the top right with the edge just over the moth. Same below. It would be safer to do this part with a layer mask. Then duplicated the layer once. That's the idea of it, duplicate to increase the sharpening. Too much on this one will bring out dots but if these are in the background new from visible and the blur brush can get rid of them.

To be honest Brian I am not sure how you are getting on with brushes so I try and post ideas that aren't too critical to use and slips shouldn't matter. A lot of that is down to choice of brush size and realising how much over lap where it isn't wanted is ok. The blend area in the brushes increase with size and there are a choice of 3 styles. Also ideally only painting black or white but the same applies to the dodges an burn tool providing only limited use of it is made. This will only change the tone levels selected as well which helps.

Since you posted an original I also wonder if you could set your camera to produce larger images. It can help PP. They can be reduced later followed by a tiny bit of sharpening. I'm not suggesting huge as that might cause problems on a bridge camera but maybe twice as big as you can still view at 50% and work at 100.

John
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