Day 5: Clearing the fog

Welcome back to day 5 of Thingadailies. Want to play along? The full video is here.

Today's starting point: 4:09

Ending point: 5:34

A quick note before we start: Karen noticed the background was flipped, so I'm flipping it to match the video, just in case that turns out to be important later. Could I just watch the rest of the video to see? Of course I could, but it's easier just to flip the background image. (And now that I think about it, that changes the direction of light in the background image, so it probably is important...)

Anyhow here's where we are at the beginning of day 5:

And we're off!

Step 1: Bring in the ivy!

As always, we horizontally flip it. We've added... four images so far? And he's flipped ever single one of them. I can learn this secret of the masters.

Anyhow, I brought in the ivy and positioned it on the horn like so:

Step 2: Color balance magic!

One thing I've noticed is that he always tweaks the cyan and yellow, but never the magenta. Is this important? I really do need to learn more about this at some point, but for now, I will follow the example. The green became more vibrant. (Right now, it kind of sticks out compared to the jungle toupee.)

Step 3: Color levels magic! (Part one)

Now it is less vibrant, though it still doesn't quite fit in with the toupee.

Step 4: Warp the ivy

Hm. This is the same thing I ran into before. My warping ability is really not good. But I got something close-ish.

Step 5: ???

There was a little weirdness going on here. He adds a little ivy mustache, then gets rid of that (or hides it?), and then sets the levels using different settings. So... I'm going to do my best to make this work.

I messed with the color balance and levels here until it seemed like the ivy matched the jungle. Am I learning something? Or did I just screw something else up and I'm going off piste? I think we all know the answer to that. Anyhow, here's where that got me:

Step 6: Bring in the foggy jungle

And then mask out the fog while highlighting the trees. I did my best. Sure, that's fine. Anyhow, here's where we end day 5.

Tip of the day:

Lock your finished layers in place so you don't accidentally move them around and end up with pixels on the side where the picture is missing. Oops.