The Post-Processing Challenge #1

[jeeperman]

Well done Al, there was a lot of good work here. Fantastic effort by all.

[Snarkbyte]

In this case, I'm fairly certain that this explanation is unnecessary for any of
the people who submitted entries in the competition. It's clear enough that
several of the other entries involved PP skill and sophistication far greater than
mine, so I'm a bit intimidated by the audience, LOL. But I do want to encourage
the practice for future rounds, and perhaps some other readers can gain
something from it. Besides, CiC is all about "sharing the knowledge", so I happily
contribute whatever and whenever I can.

I did all of the PP for this challenge using Photoshop CS5, so my description
will be rather specific to that software. This isn't a plug for Photoshop,
but it's what I use, and I'm not familiar enough with PS Elements, GIMP, or
any of the other image editing packages to provide the equivalent steps, so
my apologies in that regard.

The original photo for the competition brought to mind the notion of the
"caffeine lift" that's part of the morning routine for so many of us as we
prepare for the day ahead, so I wanted to express that thought visually by
replacing the cup with a jet engine exhaust nozzle and afterburner chamber,
adding a "Remove Before Flight" tag on the teabag for a touch of humor.
The 1st step was simply to obtain shots of the engine and the tag,
since I didn't already have them. The engine shot was taken at the local
aviation museum... this particular engine (a Pratt & Whitney J58 turbojet,
in case anyone is interested) was chosen because it was accessible, and it had
a lot of details to add interest. The "Remove Before Flight" tag was just a
keyring tag I purchased at the museum souvenir shop. I took several shots of
both the engine nozzle and the tag from different angles, to avoid major
distortion while blending the images in PP. I wanted the opening of the engine
nozzle to match the rim of the cup, so shots from slightly different angles
allowed me to pick the best fit for perspective.

I opened the original, engine nozzle, and tag files in PS, and used the
selection tools to remove the engine and tag from the backgrounds, then pasted
these selections into separate layers in the original image. (Hereafter referred
to as the "Cup", "Engine", and "Tag" layers for clarity of exposition.) I then
temporarily made the Tag layer invisible, so I could work on aligning the
engine with the cup image.

I reduced the opacity of the engine layer to ~30%, so I could judge size and
alignment with the cup image in the underlying layer, then used the Transform
tool to resize, position, and rotate the engine to fit over the cup, with a
minor tweak in perspective to align the nozzle opening with the cup rim. Then
I added a mask to the Engine layer and increased the opacity of the
layer to 100%. The mask was added so I could make the steam from the Cup layer
visible inside the rim of the cup/nozzle. I used the Paintbrush to define the
mask, varying opacity, brush size, and feathering in different areas, so that
the stream could be visible without obscuring the afterburner and engine nozzle
above the line of the liquid tea. Because the steam is brighter than the blue
cup, it is possible (to some extent) to make the steam visible above the line
of liquid without revealing the blue cup by carefully adjusting the opacity of
the mask, so the steam is visible against the nozzle background. Some of the
blue interior is still visible inside the rim, but it's deep enough inside the
rim that it doesn't hide any interesting detail of the engine (and I rather
liked having some subtle color inside the rim to complement the blue handle).
Some special attention for the mask was required to make the cup handle, teabag
and the string attached to the teabag visible... there was no special technique
here, just some extra attention to detail for mask definition using the
Paintbrush.

Now it was time to work on the Tag layer, so the layer was made visible at 100%
opacity, and the Transform tool again used to resize, position, and rotate the
the tag, aligning it with the teabag string, and again with some minor tweaking for
perspective. No mask or opacity adjustment were needed for this layer, since
the tag completely obscures everything behind it.

A Brightness/Contrast Adjustment layer was then added for each of the Engine and
Tag layers, and each of these layers was adjusted for overall image balance. After
that, all 3 layers were flattened, and the entire image was sharpened and
converted to JPEG for uploading.

That's all, folks, I hope it at least made some sense. Thanks again to everyone
for the votes and kind comments; I look forward to learning from your PP
techniques in future PP challenges (and many thanks to Will for the original
image).

[Donald]

Thanks Al. This is ideal. Hopefully others will learn from the above, very clear explanation

[Sonic4Spuds]

Al,

It is an honor to have someone creating artwork like this on top on my photography, and the idea was supperb (must I say that this drink had no caffine ). The process description was well done, and should be helpfull to anyone using GIMP.

-Sonic

[3Wheels]

Al, great piece of work and it got my imagination going, well done. Your work through is something I'll be using as a reference. I really enjoyed this comp, if I'd known how good the competition was going to be I wouldn't have entered so quickly - lesson learnt