PAD 365 - Crazy Crayons

[Mike Farley]

Day 365 and the image I hardly dared to think that I would make when I first started this year long project. The initial plan had been an outdoor shot, but the wet weather put paid to that, so I used this idea I had been holding in reserve for a rainy day.

Canon EOS 7D
Voigtländer APO-Lanthar SL II 90mm f/3.5
25 secs
f/8
ISO 200
Tripod
Cable release

[Paul Heester]

What a great shot and really original. Looks like the crayons visited a "Hall of Mirrors" . Was it the work of Photoshop or some light-bending effect?

[davidc]

My guess is the photoshop blur tool on the stretched tips of the pencils with selective hue change layers to make the outside of the pencil different to the "pencil lead" colours?

[Mike Farley]

What a great shot and really original. Looks like the crayons visited a "Hall of Mirrors" . Was it the work of Photoshop or some light-bending effect?

It's Photoshop of course. The idea is relatively simple, but the execution was time consuming.

• In a separate layer, the tips of the crayons were extended using the Transform Distort tool.
• The colours coming from each pencil were switched with individual copy and pastes. (I did try reversing the ends of the pencils in one go, but naturally nothing lined up.) This left me with a number of separate layers as each paste created a new one, so I created a new combined layer formed from all the lower layers by pressing the CTRL+ALT+Shift+E keys simultataneously. (Mac users will have to work the equivalent command keys for themselves.) This preserved the separate copy and paste layers in case I needed to go back to an earlier stage. (Fortunately, this did not prove necessary. )
• In a copy of the new layer, there was a lot of work to create a seamless blend between the colour for each crayon and its pencil. Mostly I used the Clone tool, but Spot Healing and the standard Healing brushes (both set to Content Aware*) played a part as well. I am not sure that this step was actually necessary, but hey, it whiled away a very wet afternoon.
• The wavy lines were created with the liquify filter in a new layer. This took some time to get the effect I was after and there were quite a few redundant layers by the time I finished. Annoyingly, the one I liked best was on a trial run where I had not bothered to adjust the Raw conversion away from its default and it took a while to find the settings that I had used previously. I just wish I had had the foresight to save the Mesh Mask.*
• The crayons were cheap ones which I bought in a pound shop (amazing what you can find in these places to make photographic accessories - they saved my PAD 365 bacon on more than one occasion ), so I tidied up the worst of the manufacturing defects in one last duplicated layer.

* I appreciate that Content Aware Healing and Mesh Mask save are currently only available in the full version of Photoshop. You did take advantage of Adobe's offer to upgrade to its Photography Program for £8-78 a month at the beginning of December when the requirement of having to have a legal copy of CS3 or later was temporarily lifted, didn't you?

[Nina]

Well done on completion of your epic project Mike! Are you going to continue into the second year?

[Mike Farley]

Thanks, Nina.

I have other photographic plans for this year which do not fit in with a PAD project, so I will not be continuing. So far this year, I have yet to take a single shot! I will, though, still be posting photos here on a regular basis.