10 Jul 14. O.K., it being Theatrical Thursday, we'll look at the third of three versions of the same file. This was created using one of the plug-ins from the company I refereed to yesterday. Now you have the original color version, plus the B&W, and creative versions. Each should give you a very different "feel" for the subject and each, I think, does a good job of showing off the area but in different ways. To get the results I do you note that I'm employing masking techniques, and I think for most folks looking at this stuff and wanting to do it, the two most difficult tasks when starting out are masking and layering. Both are extremely easy to do, but like anything else, it is easy to do once you know how to do it. Like riding a bike. Easy, but not the first time you got atop one. So let's chat a bit about making a mask. Let's go back to elementary school when you took a light and cast a shadow of a classmate on a black sheet of paper and cut out the inside. You called that a silhouette and when you placed that black piece of paper over a white sheet of the same dimension, you had a face that was white. You could, of course, have switched the colors of the papers, or even used other colors, but the process would have been the same. The white (underlying) sheet was the background, and the black (overlaying) sheet was the mask. In photographic image manipulation programs, the color white is used to show something at 100 % opacity or totally visible, the color black for 0 % opacity or totally hidden, and shades of gray to show opacity amounts in between. We commonly say "White reveals, Black conceals". So back to our silhouette. The white paper was totally revealed EXCEPT for the area where the black paper concealed it. And that's all there is to masking as complicated as it sounds. That said, masks can be very intricate employing MANY shades of gray to selectively conceal or revel details. But like anything else, you first learn how to sit on the seat, totally grasp the handle bars, and go straight down the street. Only with practice do you ride with no hands or doing a handstand on the handle bars. These three images have had some very complex masks employed to get the results I desired, but the process is the same, simple or complex. Same shooting info as before (same image), Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 8.