Merry Christmas DF
 

HO HO...er...you get it...
Attachment 13

This must be the infamous "cigar experience" photo that I heard about.

I'm curious what filters you've applied to this, as it comes across not so much as a photo anymore, but has been turned into a piece of artwork that looks very much like a painting in oil or acrylic. As far as "filtered works" go, I think this is one of your better pieces.

Basically, this is what I did.

Convert from RAW
Photomatix to give the skin more 'grit' to it.
Whitened the eyes and put more blue to them as well.
Made the red pop with curves.
Made the white, whitER.
Added a solid white layer as the background (Original backdrop was white cloth but not white enough.)
Masked it out so that only I showed.
Upped the saturation a bit as well as contrast.
Selective dodge and burn.
Resized and then used the USM to get details where I wanted and masked out where I didn't want any.

I'd try to work on your mask technique so that the halos don't show around the edges, or at least not give such a soft outline around the object. It gives it the appearance that it was shot with a cheap lenses, and the associated halo problems when a cheap lens is at a wide aperture.

One way to get a really white background is to pop a separate flash against a white background. I'm sure there are other (maybe better) techniques for this. It's not something I've worked on much, as I typically shoot environmental portraits.

I'd say your goal, seeing how you like to have plain backgrounds, would be to learn how to shoot it as you want it in-camera, and leave filtering solely for clean-up and effects.

I'm not familiar with Photomatrix off-hand, but it looks to be a sharpening algorithm of some kind. It's definitely an image with extra sharpness (artificial), and that extra contrast really gives it that gritty look.

I like the image. I need to try some of the "gritty" look myself here.

Photomatix is an HDR app. When applied to one image it does some funky stuff to images that don't really have a high dynamic range.

As for the halos...that's laziness at work. I would've used the technique you said, or ironed out the cloth, or shot during the day time with the sun coming through the cloth. Many ways to do it, no patients TO do it. It's a lot easier when working with black backgrounds since you can blend that well with good black clothes...

I can be lazy too -- and I have a technique that sort of allows for it! Zoom in more on your image, and use a smaller brush. Don't try to trace entirely "by hand", but rather hold the SHIFT key a lot, and do lots of smaller straight lines. Pick a fuzzy edged brush, but the smaller brush will not create bad halos. It only takes a little bit longer than a larger brush, but it looks much better. The magnetic lasso is another way to cheat, but I still prefer my SHIFT+eraser method. I'm not fond of letting a computer try to do my thinking for me.

If the image is important enough, I would get the image without halos...this was just for fun and sending it out as new year cards...people will get a kick out of it anyways. Some more pics in the future to come WITHOUT halos.