How I Did That::
After requests and comments on how the Lucid dream Image was created, I decided to post this simple explanation.
Firstly all I used to create the Blue Lighting in the middle of the shot was the red LED mini light you see here on the right next to my Nikon Infra Red remote control unit. I use these for night shots.
For the Nikon users, you can see I have drilled a hole in the remote and attached a neck lanyard, this just means when shooting in the pitch black I know its safe and I wont drop the damn thing and loose it. ;)
lucid dream:
Firstly what you see here is the original shot, you can see that its crap. That is because it is supposed to be. It is simply a shot of water falling from a tap into a sink thats half full, I left the plug hole open and got the water to run so the level stays the same and took a few. I used a fast shutter speed minimize blur
The lighting is poor deliberately to ensure that there is a yellow / brown colour to it for the 2nd stage. You can just tell that while taking the shot, I used the Blue LED light and I pointed the light at the centre where the water was falling. - Yes I had an idea what it was going to look like even at this stage from past experiments ;)
Open you image editor and load the original up. For this explanation I will be talking Photoshop. Although I did this shot in Nikon Capture 4.
For the whingers that want to whinge that photoshop did this, well tough shit because Im not going to buy $400 worth of lighting kit to create the same thing, or mess around with special lights and filters....or even waste a good beer pooring it down a sink to get the yellow colour. Its an abstract and its probably had less manipulation in terms of processing time than the average shot. - Took me about 2 minutes. Ok rant over...
Adjustments > Auto Levels.
Here you see the image after clicking "Auto levels", this auto calculates colours, levels, contrasts etc. At this stage the shot suddenly has an all new look after one click. Now you see why the poor lighting is important, for the yellow / warm areas of the water.
Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation.
I increased the Saturation by +22, this increases the colour of the blue and yellow.
Image > Adjustments > Curves
At this point I wanted to darken the dark / shadow areas and increase the light on the lighter areas. So I simply set the curves in a simple "S" curve by pulling the line down at the bottom and back up at the top to create an "S". This you can play with until your happy with the result.
Thats it. 3 Simple steps and you have an abstract from a crap original. There was no sharpening done, but you can sharpen as you see fit.
One last step that you could also do is change the colours in the
Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation.
Just slide the slider back and to in the Hue area and see the colours change. This shot has no adjustment..
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