In the city | Photoshop Manipulations | Photo Forum

Oksona,  Thanks!  I’m not a photoshop expert so there may be better ways to do this, but here’s what I did… I don’t have any lighting so i setup a piece of white butcher paper on a table next to a window (put a bend in it so it would be the floor and background of the image).  Then setup all the screws and bolts (yes, i knocked them over a few times :-)).  I took a number of shots attempting to focus on different screws to get them all in focus (i did okay here, but there are still some not in focus).  Then in photoshop I aligned and stacked all the images so that it would select the most in focused portion of each shot.  I then spent some time selecting all the background (which at least was a consistent color, but it did take some time particularly between the screws) then inverted the selection and copied the screws to a new layer.  I then went to the trusty internet looking for a background with water in the foreground and the main light coming from the left (as that is where the window was in my original shot).  I tested a few and this one seemed to work better than some others.  I set up a 50% gray layer and tried to burn in some land as the shot didn’t have any but this didn’t work well so I painted in some in gray (this is the part of the picture I’m not really happy with so I’m open to suggestions on a better way to do this).  I then inverted the screws and copied to a new layer… I aligned them with the bottom of the screws, adjusted the opacity to around 35%, added a motion blur and gaussian blur to where I thought it looked right in the picture…