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Siri Stafford, my art director at the time, suggested this image file for me. She asked me for the picture because I thought my specialty to use Photoshop values to create conceptual images made me a logical choice for the job. Honestly, I loved the idea, but what the hell you lightning hitting on a tree really looks like?

I turned to developing technology that has changed so radically the world of commercial photography … the Internet. Simply type in the Google Image Search "lightning and the tree". In just a few minutes I had found some obviously amateur pictures … but the actual images of those who were nonetheless impressive lightning hitting the trees. Now there was a necessary goal.

In my mind I imagined a vast solitude of the land with a single oak tree. A ray is captured as it hits the tree and lights up the scene around him. The bolt down the tree lighting sheets, both from above and behind the same time. The sky is dark storm clouds at dusk.

Photographing the Oak Tree

There are many oak trees near my home in Marin County across Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I explored an open space nearby and found an oak tree that fits my needs. A snapshot that just before noon, with a slight back lighting. At that time I was still using film and the image captured with a Hasselblad medium format camera film Kodak Ektachrome. Because the slope of the land they could not get the whole tree in the frame, despite my wide-angle lens, unless the camera again diagonal angle. In the same place I found and photographed an area of land open to the forefront of wild oats. In my files I found a picture of a sky Cloudy and some distant mountains low shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a winding dirt road through the composition.

How a photo of lightning

During a recent winter trip to Ladakh, a region of Kashmir, often called "Little Tibet" I I have my lightning. It was long after dark and was suffering so much by altitude sickness and a case of the chimney exacerbated by extreme cold in my unheated room. A flash of light illuminated the room and pick Storm immediate testimony of the closeness of the strike. Being as how they had never managed to shoot a ray (rarely we have a ray in the bay of San Francisco), I managed to crawl away from under the covers and faced my camera. With my head spinning fitness I pushed a roll of film stunned in my F100, stabilized on the sill of the window, open the shutter and waited. Boom! Another flash. Repeat the procedure until I had shot a roll then up, shaking, back in my cot. As a photographer of values using Photoshop to compose many of my images together, always I'm on the look out for items that I will be able to use in my composite values. That effort finally paid off, I thought as I scanned two the shooting lightning for this image. I did scans using my ScanMate 5000 drum scanner and scan images of 100 megabytes each.

Using Adobe Photoshop to combine the images in a photo

I started assembling the image using a layer mask to paint together landscape and cloud images. I merged the layers, duplicate the new layer, lightened up with a curves adjustment layer, and then used the layer mask painting in the area to be "illuminated" by lightning. The tree was selected using the palette, magic wand and lasso tools in conjunction with alpha channels. Make a selection from a tree with thousands of leaves is a challenge and in this case requires only the previous sequence of operations, but also time is a considerable increase 100% by hand, using the lasso tool, "cleaning up" even more than the selection of trees. With the selected tree I copied and pasted into the background. I duplicate the layer tree twice, one with dark corners and alleviate the other. Then I used masking layer to create the effect of the areas light and dark, where the beam illuminates the leaves closest to the lightning. Finally, I brought the beam itself, the hit and then set the layer mode to "clarify" only. By setting the mode to "clarify" the pixels in the image rays which were lighter than the rest underlying pixels Image to be the only visible … therefore there was no need to "strip" the beam background is dark (I used curves to darken the image enough to eliminate all but the beam itself). I used the brush to thin "tune" the path of the screw.

A timeless image of art or image bank

In the end I have not only a beautiful image, but a conceptual action image that can be used to illustrate a series of marketing concepts. The image is exactly the kind of image you strive to create dramatic, useful and timeless.

About the Author:

For hundreds of pictures of funny animals and great stock photography Fine Art Prints & Stock Photos Fine art prints and printed merchandise also available at his site.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Creating a Fine Art Image and Stock Photo With Photoshop

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