Poster #9

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The Race was miles long. She ran it... against racism. I'm guessing she's run that race throughout her life - actually as opposed to this morning when she ran it metaphorically.

Her exhaustion is so wonderfully mixed with a satisfaction... that brings the word 'dignity' to my mind. You know, I believe that all of our hopes may be minor, except to us, but some things matter because we choose to make them matter. And so this lady just ran for miles, and her satisfaction is what it meant to feel, "Everyone won..."

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Once again - here's the virgin image from my flash card. Again the image was captured with my mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens.




As with the others in this series I drew this image into a square template by replacing the contents of the smart filter in my template (where the text already existed as well.)
I simply moved the original about within the square frame to maximize the composition. In post the problem was to deal with the explosion of confusion. Which first required the AlienSkin Bokeh filter to deal with the depth of field. That easily allowed me to convincingly blur the background. I then created a series of adjustment filters to restructure the dynamic range. Of course this also allowed me to re-arrange the highlights and shadows along with the color range and vignetting. One again, I over balanced the lightig and effects so that I could once again turn to the AlienSkin SnapArt filter.

Once again I opted for the oil painting option to continue the style of this series. I adjusted the stroke length and depth, lighting, contrst, and color balance... particularly in micro areas throughout the plane. Settling on an image I saved the effect on a new higher level. then Masked away with various brushes each set at about 30 opacity so the effect cold be gently introduced. This allowed me to bring back skin texture and perspiration highlights particularly on her arms and on the right eye region as we look at the image.

I merged the layers, duplicated the result and pulled out the Topaz Adjustment filter. This llowed me to draw considerable texture and vivacity into the image. Of course I applied a mask to this layer as well... at full intensity, so I could selectively brush in dramatic elements at full, well... Topaz, so to speak.

Finally I used an adjustment layer to reduce and balance the saturation throughout the image and then after flattening those layers I duplicated this layer, ran it through the smart filter, fully masked it, then brushed in sharpness and texture in key areas, particularly around the eyes and hair.

Simple? Um, well no. But if you're looking for some filter which will create result like this at the click of a button... well Buddy, luck ain't with you :-)