Wine Glass Weather Goggles

A topical Photo Composition this time…as always, the shit weather in Ireland is a hot topic so here’s a montage suggesting we all drown our weather sorrows!

Assets:

1 dull, stormy Beach shot from sxc.hu
1 Wine Glass photo from sxc.hu
1 Old Post pic from sxc.hu

Process:

The beach shot was my base layer so I cut out the Glass and Post from their respective backgrounds using the Pen Tool and copied them into the beach pic, placed and sized appropriately. I duplicated the post a couple of times and spaced them out to simulate a fence type situation, editing each one with the Spot Healing, Clone and Burn/Dodge Tools to make them look different.

Next, I masked the glass and chose a 50% opaque brush and brushed out the middle of it so you could see the sea/sky background behind it. I then duplicated the beach layer and chose Filter – Liquify to warp the sea and sky behind the glass (I grabbed a wine glass from the drinks cabinet to check how a glass distorts things for this step!). I then added 2 new layers, set them to Overlay blending mode and manually painted in blue sky and sea behind the glass, using Hue/Saturation sliders to edit the colours a bit. I then manually drew in shadow under the glass to ground it on the post a bit.

I couldn’t find a decent rainy beach shot so I added my own rain next! I added 2 ‘Rain’ layers, both just black filled with slightly different settings for Noise and Blur filters then set both to Screen blending mode. I then used the layer opacity sliders to adjust them against each other slightly.

To add to the misery of the shot, I decided to make everything Black and White. Whenever I do this I always add 2 Hue/Saturation Adjustment layers on top of the colored image, bring the saturation right down on the top one and go in and edit the Lightness for each colour channel separately on the bottom one. That just gives better control over the tone than using Image – Mode – Grayscale.

Finally, I added a vignette cause I’m mad for them at the minute and some touching up here and there, specifically using the Dodge tool to brighten the tops of posts to suggest wetness and here’s the finished composition: