submarineIncineration

It’s a Photoshop project. I took two pictures; one of me lighting the barbecue, and one of my friends working scale model sub in the pool. I started with the picture I took of me lighting the barbeque (IMG_479.jpg). I created a black background layer. Then I proceeded to remove the black background of the scene using the background eraser tool. I used a low flow rate on the eraser to remove some spots and a wall. Then I saved the image as submarineIncineration.psd. I then reduced the submarine image (IMG_0669.jpg) to match the BBQ image size and resolution. I brought the sub in, selected a rectangle around the sub, inverted the selection, and cleared. Next I went into quick mask mode and worked on isolating the sub for quite a while. The pattern stamp tool was used to get rid of the ripple distortions caused by the water surface. “Auto Levels” was applied to the sub layer. After I finished q-masking the sub out of the water I set it’s “blend if” underling layer so the fire below it would show through a little. I made a copy of the fire layer. I then moved the fire above the sub and made a clipping mask of it. I added a layer style stroke for a charred look. The flow on this layer was set to 0 so only the stroke would show. This is where it gets complicated. I made ten copies of the fire layer. These were all on top with clipping masks. The “blend if” color level for each of these are contiguous. (170-160,159-149,148-138,etc.) Each layer decreases in opacity by 10% so the fire is thins according to the gray level.