102: Threesome

Still cold outside, and dementia is setting in. But instead of simply caving, I figured I'd attempt to harness some of it – specifically through my camera lens. This picture represents some of the results. Rather than describe the mood that inspired this photo session (because there's more, believe you me), I thought I'd detail the process that turned the raw image into this delicately Photoshopped final piece. It wasn't that difficult.

I first set up the shot. Recently I purchased a new sheet of that puke-green vinyl desk covering to protect the soft pine table in our attic. I used it for this shoot, taping it to the wall and flowing it over the desk to help eliminate background edges and shadows. It would fill the screen and allow for easy close-cutting in case I would follow that route (and I did). I used the tripod since I wanted to use the fading natural light in the room.

In Photoshop I cropped it to a square, duplicated the image and set about close-cutting the three animals on the copied layer (simple, since all the edges were so sharp). Once finished, I was able to tinker with the hue and saturation of the background without affecting the animals, mainly taking some sting out of the awful green coloured vinyl.

To get the desired effect on the animals, I pumped up the contrast some – but mostly it was setting their stand-alone layer mode to multiply, and then duplicating it to create even more contrast. There was some dodging and burning involved, to bring back some of the highlights in the elephant's dark body and to keep the armadillo's flanks from completely whiting out.

Back to the base layer, I added a circular gradient (olive-green to white) – set to multiply mode – to create a subtle central background highlight and darken the image's edges. I darkened the frame even more with the burn tool and finally added the edge effects with a myriad of downloaded custom brushes, their opacity set low (about 20 per cent), again set to multiply mode. And like I mentioned, there's more to see over on my Flickr site from this shoot, and closer looks at the detail on them. Below is the original shot.