One day, when I was post-processing a photo, one of the kids came to the realisation I was a fake: “Oooh… you aren’t good at taking photos at all! You are just good at Photoshopping!” ;-)

Today I actually did fake the photo, but this time I’m gonna show the path I took from truth to fake. This first photo here, is the end result.

It started with a tin of Smart Mass from ThinkGeek:

I took a photo of it, by the ambient light from the window (5 meters away) and my monitor (white and blue light mainly):

In PhotoShop I first added automatic colours, which made it a bit brighter, and then cropped it:

I liked the result already, but decided to play with the curve tool anyway, so I added a layer for the curve tool, and started playing with the individual colours. Blue, green and red, and I only pulled each curve down or up, no S shapes or anything. This was the result:

And that’s when the problem started. Now I had two photos I liked. One with the correct (realistic) colour, albeit a good bit brighter, and one in a much less realistic colour, but showing better the metallic looking streaks that are really in the stuff.

Result: I couldn’t choose!

So, I saved a copy of it, just in case, and then got the erasor tool and selectively erased the darker layer:

But I still like each layer by itself as well, so the above is basically just an excuse to upload all 3 versions :-)