Flamejob

Interview by SnowDog

1: Tell me something about the image?

This is an old carving that I photographed about 12m ago – apparently it’s a few hundred years old. It reminded me of a scene from an old Conan novel hence the strange name.

2: How did you create it? ( you don’t have to give away any secrets ),

I took a shot of this carving with a Nikon D70. Using the marquee selection tools, I highlighted the faces of the individual people/elephants that I wanted to emphasize. I then feathered the selections by about 200 and used the level adjustment to lighten those portions up a bit. I then inversed the selection, gave it a slight Gaussian Blur and used the Exposure function to darken or de-emphasize. I then used a separate picture of a rusty metal wall (I have a folder full of them), dragged it into the original image and changed the blending mode to Overlay. The rusty orange was too strong so I used the Desaturation tool to slightly reduce it. The faces on the original carving had eyes, etched in as opposed to hollowed out as I have represented them so I used the burn tool to give them a hollowed out appearance. To finish it I did a bit of minor dodging and burning to bring things out of the dark background (horses harness, Elephants eyes etc).

3: What version of PhotoShop did you use?

Photoshop CS2

4: Any tips or tricks you would like to Share?

Overlaying textures ! So unpredictable, awesome results.

5: How did you go about learning PhotoShop?

I bought a copy of CS2 about 2 years ago and basically taught myself. I jus texperimented and used a couple of online tutorial sites like Good Tutorials.com. There is still a large part of the Photoshop functionality that I’ve yet to learn but which has no real relevance to what I use PS for.

Interview by SnowDog