Visual Art by Jacob Mann |
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Glass in black and white When this picture was receiving an award in camera club competition one of the judges said: "Background - this is what makes this picture". I was happy to hear it because I've spent day and days working on that background.
This picture had been shot in my studio on a glass table using light box, umbrella and strobes. But to light it so it had a diagonal in the background was above my technical capability. The only way to do it was with Photoshop. I've created a layer with rich black color and applied gradient tool to add a white diagonal. This was easy part. Next step was to select glass pieces so I could place them on a separate layer before placing them on top of the new background. The problem was that the picture had to be printed in large size, so whatever selection I've made gave the objects rugged edges when picture was magnified. The only way to get away with this was to use pen tools. Pen tools are different from all others Photoshop tools for selection because they are vector based tools. They don't select pixels like all other tools, they create path which can be converted to selection. This allows creation of really smooth edges in selections. On the downside this tool requires a lot of work, every anchor point has to be placed precisely. I've spend days till I've achieved the result that satisfied me. |
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Please email me your comments or orders or visit my Blog where you can read more about me and my work, articles on photography, printing and composition and also you can post there your comments. All the images on this website are
copyrighted by Jacob Mann and are thus protected to the fullest
extent of the law.
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