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Shooting Beauty Series
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Surfacing
The sky was lightly overcast and the pool of this Siesta Key home was surrounded on three sides by the tall walls of the house. The fourth side, the “vanishing edge” of the pool, can be seen in the background of the final shot.
Nell Rose is 5' 2" but I’ve always thought her best look was elegance. GW put her in a thin peasant dress and had her wade in the pool.
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Click to view a larger image
Two original images.
These two original shots each had something desirable. The “framing” of Nell by the pool edges and stairs is worth saving, but she is overexposed and the pose is a bit awkward.
This is a much better pose so the task is to insert Nell from this photo into the first. Typically, we could resize the image of Nell before we did this. She is a bit bigger in the second photo so simply overlaying her onto photo one will give the impression that the pool was photographed from a closer distance. In this case that looked just fine, so no resizing was performed.
In photo #2, use the lasso tool with a feather value of 20 (in the small 900 pixel-width copy of this photo) to draw around Nell. Select a good-sized margin around her so the selection is roughly double the width of her image. Copy it, select the first photo, and paste Nell #2 over Nell #1.
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Blending.
After pasting Nell 2 over Nell 1, with the patch of Nell still selected, use the levels command to adjust the brightness of the water around Nell in the overlay you just pasted to match the water in the pool in the original image.
Then use the cloning stamp tool to finish the blend, smoothing the tonal transitions aroound the edge of the overlay.
Using the cropping tool, crop the image to place Nell more to the left and eliminate the photo reflector at the left bottom edge.
Then, using the curves command, gently nudge the curve upward to the left to bring out the highlights and to slightly lighten the image. And, of course, use the clone stamp tool to remove the hose that is jutting into the pool on the right side.
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Smoothing the skin.
Nell has some peeling from an aggressive sun tan, so use a combination of healing brush and airbrush set at about 20% opacity to remove any skin anomalies.
Then use the GEM Airbrush Pro filter to smooth the skin overall. Again, a blending value of 40 for the Airbrush Pro smooths the skin without making Nell look like a mannequin.
Next, apply the diffuse glow filter, with the amount to 2%, the gain to 0, and the clear to 12. Then use the fade diffuse glow command to drop the opacity of the glow to 40%. This softens both the white material of her dress and her skin.
The image has strong colors so you don’t need to add any saturation.
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Train paint overlay.
Next, open the overlay photo (a macro photograph of paint from the side of a train), select the rectangular marquee tool and draw a rectangle around 75% of the image, using a feather value of 200. Invert this selection to form the framework that will overlay the main image.
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Final image.
Copy the paint framework, select the main image, and paste it over Nell and the pool. Select the frame layer in the Layers box, and reduce the opacity to 75% to produce the final image.
Download the full size copies of the merged pool image, train paint overlay, and final image
here
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