I was thinking about Donnie Darko while conceiving this image which might be how I ended up with a Frank-like light flare over my eye. The background curtain and all light effects are from Graphic Stock. The rabbit came from a Graphic Stock image that I turned into a Photoshop brush and added a glow to. The girl is made up of different photos of parts of my body while the hat and flying hair were shot separately. It took forever to get a flattering light set-up. I photographed myself in my garage against a black sheet using a household lamp and Speedlite for lighting. Coincidentally, I recently realised that the bird on my business card (created for me by a designer in the UK) is almost the same bird on the cover of the book I’m currently reading, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which just happens to be a book about two magicians. So easy! Flame Painterīecause magic is the underlying theme of my blog I decided that turning myself into a magician would be a good way to illustrate how to use special effects. Remember you can also use warp (Edit>Transform>Warp)and liquify (Filter>Liquify) to shape the stock to fit your image. Then just move your stock into place and mask parts out if necessary. If you can’t entirely get rid of the black background add a levels adjustment layer (clip it to your stock layer by alt clicking between the two layers) and move the sliders until the background disappears. Open up your chosen stock as layers above your main image, and working through them one by one choose the move tool (v) and cycle through your blend modes using Shift + or – until you find one that gets rid of the dark background (I used Screen, Soft Light and Lighter Color the most). I signed up for a 7 day trial with Graphic Stock and searched for images using search terms like galaxies, rays, flare, glow, bokeh and fractal. I’m no graphic designer and I don’t have the talent or the know how to create graphics from scratch so I prefer to use a stock agency for graphic art. This can be stock you’ve shot yourself (light painting, sparklers, smoke – all techniques I will cover in future) or stock from an agency. You should also colour the light to match the final effect if you’re comfortable working with gels. You can recreate this lighting in Photoshop but light and shadow are always going to be more accurate if you shoot them for real. What I didn’t do but should have was to remove the hat from the scene and position the lamp so the light was shining upwards roughly where the hat would be and then photographed myself next to that spill of light so my face was properly lit. For example, I was shooting with a top hat and I knew I wanted light coming from the hat so I put a small torch inside the hat shining out and then lit the top of the hat with a lamp so the rim was lit up. Try and replicate the light your effect will create.Just try and match the tone of your “studio background” to the tone of your replacement background and everything becomes much easier.) (This was the first time I’ve shot against a black background cos I was under the mistaken impression that it’s easier to cut out brown hair from a white background. Shoot against a dark backdrop – even if you’re going to replace the background later you’ll probably be replacing it with a dark scene so you want the tone of the scenes to match. You can add special effects to any image you like but if you’re shooting specifically with special effects in mind there’s a few tricks you can do to really sell the effect.
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