Another Ballerina pic

[WingAnimal]

Here's another ballerina pic. I didn't know what to do with this pic. If anyone has an idea of what I could have done differently, I am totally open. I have a few more ideas of my own - but I haven't had the time to work on them. Maybe this weekend.

[kayser]

I like it! Soon you'll have a gallery of beautiful ballerina pics.

One thing you might try for a different effect on this or other ballerina pictures is the soft spotlight effect (I just saw it in Scott Kelby's book)

Duplicate layer
Filter > Render > Lighting Effects
Choose flashlight under the style pop-up menu
You can move around the light by dragging on the center circle and you can make it bigger by dragging the side points.

After you've done that, you can play around with the opacity of the layer and you can change the blend mode to darken to make the colors seems less saturated.

[Ward Grant]

I hope you don't mind, but I copied your picture to try a quick effect. This was a quick try so I am sure you could do much better with the original.

I thought the background was a tad dark so I removed it and then put a gradient layer behind it. I played around with a couple of them and I liked the effect of the copper. I then wanted to help accent her arm placement so I played around and came up with these settings:Style-Reflected; Angle-99.46 and Scale-53%.

Again, the key is trying different gradients and backgrounds.

http://img314.imageshack.us/img314/8391/balletcopper8zp.th.jpg (http://img314.imageshack.us/my.php?image=balletcopper8zp.jpg)

[WingAnimal]

Kay and Ward - Great ideas! Thank you for your input. I'll play around with them as I get time. Any others? I love variety.

[kayser]

Norm,

If you haven't gone through all the tutorials, I would just go into the video tutorial section and pick one and use your pics to try it out. The wedding one might be a good one to try for this...

Also, if you have other ballerina pictures, you could try the sketch effect and then add the color back in:

Layer>Duplicate Layer
Enhance>Adjust Colour>Remove Color (desaturate the duplicate)
Layer>Duplicate Layer (duplicate the desaturated layer)
Filter>Adjustments>Invert (Inverts the new layer)
Go to the layers palette and change the new top layers blend mode to Color Dodge (It will now go white)
Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur ... adjust until it looks how you want it to

And then duplicate the background copy again and make it the top layer. Then change the opacity of this background copy layer to 20% or so.

I did it on yours just to show you what it would like.


http://img454.imageshack.us/img454/7707/kristaballet20pv.th.jpg (http://img454.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kristaballet20pv.jpg)

[kayser]

It's always easier to come up with ideas for OTHER people's pictures...:)

[WingAnimal]

Cool... thanks Kay. I agree, it's easier to see the work on someone elses photo. I think we tend to be too attached to our own. Still, it's fun to see what other people come up with and then pick and choose from those ideas to formulate your own. It gets the creative juices flowing.