There are a couple of projects intersecting here. One is that I've decided that if I don't tackle my filing system there will be an avalanche and I will be buried and no one will ever know what my system was. (There never was a system; that's the system.) So starting with 2007 and working forward I am trying to organize stuff into collections. And I came across
this ridiculous thing, a small plastic monster with an LED eye that was sitting on a shelf someplace so I took its pitcher with my tiny, then-new Nikon L-12. The original capture was made just shy of 10 years ago. With the original file were several clumsy attempts to do "something" with it in Photoshop Elements 2.0, mostly involving trying to cut it away from its bad background, so I came up with this new series:
This is one of the original, available dark, essentially "raw" captures (in that nothing was done with it). You can see from the pushpin that it's pretty small. The second figure is actually its reflection in some glass or plexiglass behind it. It's a dreadful picture (never mind the subject). It's underexposed thanks to the bright LED, the light is from somewhere dead overhead, just awful!
This one looks like I popped the peanut flash on it so it's not the
exact same file, but anyway I first worked it over in Lightroom CC 2018 to try to do the usual rescuing, exposure, contrast curves, sharpness, white and black points, et cetera yada so forth. At this stage it's not as terrible (never mind the subject) but I still want to do something about that impossible background, and the only thing I can think of is to completely change it out. Onward to PHOTOShop!!
So this is where I arrived after too many steps, but the most important was to cut the thing and its reflection out in Select and Mask so I could drop it onto something else. I am slowly growing more comfortable with Select and Mask but I will not try to tell you it's miraculously easy, and this (never mind the) subject doesn't even have hair! I ended up doing masking overlays and graduated backgrounds (using the same colors as in the (never mind the) subject). I'm not going to pretend this is great, but it was a pretty good exercise in getting there, and since it was awful (never mind the subject) I thought I'd share.
This one isn't bad-bad... Pretty good actually, compared to earlier tries. Keep on keepin' on... (sure is an ugly little critter)
