F/8 And Be There… Or Not Film + Digital = Photograph Page 2

7. Next I used the Elliptical Marquee tool to select an area that would fill in the missing part of the car's shadow. With the top layer set at 100 percent Opacity, I used the Curves command (Image>Adjustments>Levels) to darken the selected area making the unshadowed parking lot as dark as the car's shadow. At this point, it's time to put the finishing touches on the car with the Eraser tool, including erasing part of the car's windows so the background shows through.

8. The Imaging Factory's Convert to B&W Pro Photoshop compatible plug-in was used on the background and foreground images to make their monochrome hues identical. The plug-in also let me change the color response to reflect my favorite monochrome film, Ilford's Delta.

9. At this point I had a composite image but I wanted to make it more realistic and dramatic. I flattened (Layer> Flatten Image) the photograph merging foreground and background into one, then used the Photo Effects Set from the Pixel Genius PhotoKit plug-in (File>Automate>PhotoKit) to apply digital ISO 400 speed film grain.

10. To give the image warm, rather than cold, tones, I used the B&W Toning Set from PhotoKit, applying the Sepia #1 (very slight) toning to the images. All of PhotoKit's various effects are applied to a separate layer so the original image remains untouched at the bottom of this growing stack of layers.

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11. Finally I used Photoshop CS Burn tool to darken in the sky and finished off the image with the PhotoKit's Burn Tone Set and burned all four corners of the photograph.

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12. All during this process I "Saved As" some of the steps as a Photoshop (PSD) file with different names, usually just adding a number to the file name. This preserves all the layers as a different version. This final image was the third and final file, but I can go back to any of the others to make any future changes without having to start from scratch.