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I've had many requests to create a walk-through on the processing of this image. I decided to

recreate and do screenshots of each step.

Here is the original image, basically straight from the camera.

Here, I simply removed the reflector and the trees and ground from the next image.

I roughed in a fairly natural looking sky but didn't obsess over getting it perfect, as

it will be obfuscated by the cloud overlay.

Here, we have selected the entire background and then overlayed our cloud background...

Here, we added a dark blue layer to help create the night illusion....

Now, we just play with the opacity of the dark blue and the cloud layers to create the dark night sky

Ok. sky is ready, so we make those layers invisilbe and start on the helicopter. We paste it in place and size it roughly. Then, we set the levels so that the sky backgrounds are a rough match.

Now, we delete the helicopter's background to make it blend in with the sky.

Create a white layer for the search light... set the opacity to 50% or so. You want to be able to see the scene behind the white layer. Then, make a trapezoid that resembles the cone of a searchlight.

Invert selection and delete so you have a white cone coming out of the chopper.

feather the edge of the selection and delete... it will feather the edge of the search cone nicely.

Here, we had to move the helicopter layer in front of the dark blue. We also moved the clouds in front, too. I played with the levels of the various layers to get a night sky again. Then, set the levels of the chopper to make it look as natrual as possible.

Then, make copies of the chopper and spotlight layers and paste. resize, reshape, and move to make a distance chopper....

Go back to a layer with a defined outline (cloud or dark blue) and reselect the area that contains the body... Then, go to the spotlight layer and press delete. This will delete the spotlight in front of the arm and make it look like it's behind....

Here is the image as it should look at this point...

Now, we set the opacity of the spotlight to be more natural looking.

Here's a quick look at the sharpening and blending that I do to get the grunge look. it's basically high pass filter in overlay or vivid light mode, add noise, and sharpening. I don't want to give too much of this detail because every image is different. I start with a new copy of the image and work on this process. I don't worry about skin tones, just the concrete and the sky texture. Once I like the textures, I paste it over the original and then delete the skin tones with a soft fairly transparent brush until I get a reasonably harsh, but somewhat natural looking skin tone.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."