A Study In Reflections...

[Lin Evans]

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/studyinreflections.zip (PC 38 meg)

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/studyinreflectionsmac.zip (Mac 38 meg)

Lin

[Ken Cox]

Lin

beauty

ken

[bogari0171]

Excellent Lin,

Congratulations

Saluti

Claudio

[Lin Evans]

Thanks Ken and Claudio - a fun experiment. I posted a link to an AVI Tutorial and brief explanation of the procedure used on the FaceBook Group page in response to a request there and I'll repeat those here for anyone interested:

Best regards,

Lin

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O.K., Here's the link to the AVI tutorial on the Reflections creation:http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/reflectionstutorial.zip (zipped avi tutorial).

Essentially the procedure is to make two masks. The first mask (in this example) replaces the original blurry fire in a fireplace with a video of a fire in a fireplace. So the original image is taken into PTE or into Photoshop (either can do this - but Photoshop is better in this case). The area where one wants the fireplace is selected with the rectangular selection tool and then everthing inside is painted white. The selection is inversed and the remainder is painted black. Black allows the image "outside" the mask to be revealed and "White" allows what is inside the mask (in this case the replacement fireplace video) to be revealed. Next, the original image is again taken into Photoshop and all the areas where you can see in the original photo that firelight was reflected are left in their original colors and everything else painted black. Not only "white" reveals what is inside the mask, but light colors in a linear fashion are transparent or semi-transparent. Since we want to follow the original reflection of the photo, we can take advantage of that and just paint everywhere we "don't" want reflections black. I used a soft brush to feather the black as it brushed against the reflected area.

So now we have two masks. One to reveal the fireplace and one for the reflections on the girl's body and the floor, etc. The actual variations in light and dark in those "orange" areas will very nicely attenuate or amplify the reflections from the fireplace we will use again inside the "reflection mask." Next we place the firplace video inside its mask and adjust the size and position and in this case the "color" (which I wanted to be more orange than yellow) using PTE. Then we place the same fireplace inside the reflection mask, but we invert it 180 degrees because reflections are upside down in this case - as they would be in a mirror. We use the PTE 3D feature to turn the fire 180 degrees. Because the area for the reflections is much larger than the actual fireplace, we adjust both the position and the "size" of the fire using the zoom features of PTE. To soften the reflections we adjust both opacity and blur in an experimental fashion untio it looks appropriate. We use the preview feature frequently to monitor our progress untill we have it as we like.