To the Kitchen, and beyond!

It has been a busy week, with Coaching and other work stuff, I didn't get any time to really come up with or shoot anything this week. So I decided to try a neat project that I saw online a while back. I went and snapped some pictures of some old cookie sheets. Here is what I started with.

Once I brought it into Photoshop I cut some circles out of it, played around with curves to get the colors right, and used the magic want tool and the color fill tool to get the water and greens in place of the grey. I also added a little outer glow to create just a bit of atmosphere. I added black circles and blurred it to make the shadows.

I used a basic star brush for the sun, then added a little lens flair from the Photoshop library. I had learned a great tip a while back for using the lens flair. First, fill your layer with black, then add the lens flair. Finally, changed your blending mode to lighten. It will remove all of the black and then you can move, scale, and layer mask the flair to something realistic and not something that people can immediately say, "Oh, that's the Photoshop lens flair"

The clouds were just Photoshop's "Render Clouds" and then changed the blend mode and backed down the opacity. (the key to any good composite)

For the stars I knew I had just the thing to complete the kitchen theme. Our cutting board is black with white sparkles in it. After taking to different shots to get big and small stars I had the perfect background. Here is one of the pictures of the cutting board.

I had a fun time trying to create something semi realistic. I had been wanting to try this for a while and think I pulled it off. I have another busy week this week, but I hope to get some shots somewhere.