I got the picture above using layers, masks and filters from this:
This is my nephew being goofy and trying on my new sun glasses. He should know I always have a camera handy just to catch these embarrassing moments. It wasn't the best picture for this assignment. I should have found one with more shadows and highlights. But I wanted to see what I could do with those sunglasses. So here's what I did:
First I made a new layer coping the original. I always do this in photoshop because I've screwed up originals in the past. I turned off the visibility of the original layer and made a layer mask on my copy (I call that my working base layer). Then I selected the mask by clicking on the mask thumbnail on the layer palette. Then on the photo I used the quick selection to select large sections of the kitchen in the background. I used the paint bucket to paint the kitchen areas black. That made the kitchen invisible. I threw in a gradient background layer, just to see that I had my mask just right.
I made several copies of this image so I could play around with several versions and not have to redo the first mask.
For my next image, I put a new background behind this picture. I use to do this kind of thing a lot using the eraser tool to get rid of cluttered backgrounds. But the mask layer method is so much better because its not destructive. When I realized I had masked out areas I didn't want to lose, I just went back and painted that area on the mask white which restored that part of the image. So here's the image with a new background (from a cruise to Redoubt Bay).
Next I wanted to play with those sunglasses. What I wanted to do was put Brian on a sunny beach and add the reflection of a girl in a bikini showing in the lenses of the glasses. But I didn't have a good picture of a bikini clad girl. So I settled for another scene from Redoubt Bay. I made another layer of Brian and made a mask layer of the lenses. This was a little tricky because the glasses and the lenses are so close to the same color. There's a little flare of light on the right lens that proved to be very problematic. I ended up painting my mask layer with the paint brush tool rather than using selection tools. Then I slipped in another layer between the two layers of Brian's face. The top Brian layer had the glasses masked out so the image underneath it shows through. I wanted to make the lens look reflective using the blend modes. But I could never find the right one for that. I ended up using the lighter color blend mode on the waterfall layer.
So when I finished, I thought it looks silly. But I learned a lot about layers and mask and next time I'll pick better photos to start with.
Next I used the technique John demonstrated in his YouTube video. I used the selections drop down menu to select and make layers of highlights, midtones, and shadows. Then I took each layer and played around with hue, brightness, saturations and levels. I saved several and put them together.
The top left one I saved because the skin tones look kind of bronze or golden. I've tried to make gold before and it never looked right. But now I have a formula for it. Base layer flesh tone, the highlights are greenish yellow, midtones a darker green and shadows blue. So the next time I want to turn something gold, I'll know I can do it with layers.
On the top right, I made the shadows and midtones dark and deleted the highlights and base layer letting the background show through. For the bottom left I was just playing with color hues, added the disco gradient, flattened all the layers and them applied the poster edge filter.
My favorite is the lower right image. I started with the image on the top left and I added black squares to the background layer. I deleted the layer with the base photo of Brian, I flattened the remaining layers and applied the cutout filter (under artistic filters). The filter settings were: number of levels - 6, edge simplicity - 10 and edge fidelity - 2. It's the only image I did that isn't goofy looking. But I think it made the others worth whiled.
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