Day 9: A Tree Appears

Personal note:

Meet Bluebell! She's a mature (geriatric?) cat who arrived at the shelter with a nasty abscess on her face. While she was being treated for that, she developed ringworm, which decreased the likelihood of any rescue group taking her. So she's staying at my place until her ringworm clears up.

This is a terrible picture. She's very lovely and sweet.

(Yes, ringworm can be transmitted to humans. My response to the email asking if anyone would be willing to foster Bluebell was "Sure, it's been a while since I've had ringworm." You can make of that what you will.)

And now, back to Thingadailies!

Welcome to day 9 of Thingadailies. Want to play along? The full video is here.

Today's starting point: 9:24

Ending point: 10:38

Today, we add a tree. For reference, this is where we left off yesterday:

Step 1: Import the tree

Thankfully, the tree had already been extracted from its background, so I didn't have to do that.

The lowest limb gets trimmed off, leaving this:

Step 2: Clean up the tree

We remove the tangle of dark branches near the base with the clone tool. (I'm still kind of terrible at using the clone tool, but it's not too noticeable when you zoom out.) And the extra chunk of the trunk gets removed. Finally, most of the grass gets masked out.

Step 3: Make the tree darker with the color levels

After:

There are actually three layers of adding shadows, each with different color levels and masking. I'm not completely sure I did what he was doing, but I lightened the top branches more than the trunk and fiddled with that a bit.

Step 4: Go back and adjust the shadows on the cliff so they are consistent with the tree.

Did I do this correctly? I have no idea. How can I be 55 and still asking if I put shadows in the right place. I mean, shadows are not a difficult concept, right? Oh well.

Anyhow, here's where we are at the end of today:

I'm happy with how it is going and I don't yet have ringworm. What else could I ask for?