Photoshop Contest

post it again so we can see it!!!

-Grant

Hi!

Mind if I join in too, this is one of my hobbies, image manipulation.

I use Photoshop, this was done with several layers, using various blending modes, and a couple of displacement maps to distort the butterflies reflection.

Mike.

I don't believe it said:

Hi!

Mind if I join in too, this is one of my hobbies, image manipulation.

I use Photoshop, this was done with several layers, using various blending modes, and a couple of displacement maps to distort the butterflies reflection.

Mike.

Click to expand...

All I can say is WOW!
Very nice...

well, its never gonna be better then that butterfly-in-the-water photo! lol, thats excellent!

staugustine68 said:

All I can say is WOW!
Very nice...

Click to expand...

Thanks!

It's actually much easier to achieve than you might think, once I'd cut out the butterfly from its original background, and added a bit of reconstruction to the missing left wing tip I copied and pasted into a new document. I used the bezier tool for this (the pen icon), it's a tricky one to get to grips with, but once mastered it gives a precision in cutting out that other masking tools can't even come close to.

Then found a photo on my drive that contained some water (it's actually a shot from a local beauty spot). I pasted this into the working document.

Selected the butterfly layer, copied it, and rotated 180o, followed by a flip to give a mirror image to the original.

The distortion of the mirrored butterfly is the key to this image, and it makes use of a filter in Photoshop called displace, it takes an image and displaces pixels of it, either right or left, depending on the grey scale value of a mask that is chosen.

What I did was to copy one of the channels from the water layer to the clipboard, and pasted them into a new document, because only one channel was copied, this makes a greyscale image, a bit of guassian blur is also added to it, this makes any effects based on the mask much smoother.

Save this image as a .psd file, it can't be any other type, only .psd files can be loaded in as displacement filters.

Back to the working document, select the inverted butterfly layer, choose filter/distort/displace, then click okay on the dialogue box that appears, this opens the file browser for you to choose a displacement filter, I selected my presaved water image. What happens then is Photoshop displaces the inverted butterfly's pixels, based on the masks greyscale values, in other words, it makes the butterfly look rippled, just like the water.

Other bits and pieces were added to enhance the image, a shadow was created under the top butterfly to give a more realistic effect, lighting and mist was added using Mystical Lighting, and the circular ripples were added using DreamSuite, both these are Photoshop add-ons that take a lot of hard work out of creating special effects, you can achieve the same thing with Photoshop alone, but it would take a bit longer to do!

Hope I've inspired some budding digiatl artists out there, once you know the secrets you can do just about anything!

Excellent work Mike! Very good!

I'm think I'm going to put up another challenge in a day or two so keep your eyes open for that in the Photog forum...

faller - you still need to work on your file size. as you can see your overall file size is like 340 KB...thats way to big for the web. Even though its about half the size as your first one it still coud be smaller. Notice that my final image is under 60 KB and is about the same dimensions as yours. Try changing the image quality when you save it as a jpeg...look for something around 7. Just experiment move the quality slider up and down and look at the file size. See how small you can get the image file size to be without loosing too much image quality. Try to shoot for under 100 KB also if you can get it workin' by changing the image quality resize it down some more.



-Grant

ok, this is not the butterfly, but something I did today. Just to test things out. ill do the butterfly later today.. o.o;

This is digital makeup =p.

Good work Chrono! That has influenced the next challenge!

Lets go guys! I wanna see your work! Here it is http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?p=10999736#post10999736

-Grant

=Joel= said:

nice work man. looks pretty cool.......shouldnt the reflection be the other way?

Click to expand...

Hi Joel,

Yes, of course it should (well spotted, I wondered if anyone would notice that), to do it properly would need an image from the underside of the butterfly, which we didn't have!

wow, the talent some people have is amazing

I dont think its OK to use Photoshop.. I feel as a swindler..