Casserole Patrol
This was a fun project that was a last minute gig for the community theater. The director and one of the actresses are friends and asked me to attend the dress rehearsal last night and make pics of the cast and get one printed 16 x 20 to put on an easel in the lobby for the performances, and they wanted an artsy enhancement. It was so much fun and I enjoyed the play. I told them to "interact with each other but be still doing it" and they were just perfect! I had to do a lot of dodging and burning with the adjustment brush in Lightroom to even out the stage lighting etc. and then I used Topaz Adjust, first the Simplify preset with a few tweaks, then applied that and added the Surreal preset with tweaks. I then duped the layer and applied the filter again, changed the mode to soft light at 44% opacity. Then merged the layers and applied pro contrast in Nik Color Efex. I had a lot of blue artifacts in the curtains so I selected them, painted over with black at 20% twice, but still had to select the curtain and desaturate it to get rid of the blue splotches. I got it printed locally this afternoon and it looks fantastic! I cropped it for OOTB but had to leave a lot more curtain and floor in it for a 16 x 20 print. It looks better bigger of course!
