Photo Competition 2022-01-31: Manipulations

Question

Theme: Manipulations

Something heavily 'photoshopped' - replaced backgrounds, inserted people or objects, etc. The resulting image can be pseudo-naturalistic or abstract.

This theme was suggested by Tetsujin.

Voting Rules

• View the submissions sorted by active to give every submitter a fair chance
• Vote up as many images as you like
• Please, up votes only! Do NOT vote down your competitors! If you don't like an image, don't vote
• Voting closes on February 13, 2022 at 12:01 AM UTC (00:01 UTC if you prefer a 24-hour time). The winner will be chosen based on votes at that time.

Submission Rules

1. One photo submission per answer. Up to three (3) entries allowed.
2. Post only photos taken by yourself or the person with you.
3. All entries should include:
   • a title for the photo
   • a location and date, if known
   • camera, lens, film stock, and exposure settings, if known
   • any other explanatory notes, comments, etc., that you want to include (completely optional)
4. The submitted image must conform to this site's content license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) with attribution required.
5. Do not use this as a forum for photo critique. Use chat instead, or ask a new question about your image.

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Next Contest

Suggest a theme by writing a new answer at the Photo of the Week Theme Ideas thread. Please make sure to check the PotW theme ideas Archive first, to make sure you aren't recycling a theme.

The highest-voted theme will be the next theme.

Good luck!

Answer 1

Manipulated Monument

23 images, stacked and blended to remove dozens of tourists at the East Coast Memorial, Battery Park, Manhattan, New York. Not a single use of the clone tool to preserve the names on the memorial (original is nearly 8 times this resolution, little hard to read them scaled down like this.)

Contact sheet of source images

Answer 2

Cosmic Lily

Water lily, split, mirrored, with 'cosmic' egg added...
Lily photo taken at Chicago Botanic Garden
Edited in Photoshop, oil paint filter

Answer 3

Leeds Market, winter's day.
Completely fake sky.
Nikon D5500 75mm f/4 1/400 ISO 100

I suppose I should start this one off, as it was my suggestion.
Unfortunately, I can't post most of my best work in this category, as it's all based on existing copyright images. I use the results just within the family, they're never published anywhere.

^{thumbnail of original}

Answer 4

Sun of the Night

Shanghai, 05/17/2010

EOS 50D, 18mm@18-55 IS, 1/15, f/4, ISO800

I was dragging the curves towards limits in different combinations and ended up liking how the street lamp turned out. Apologies for the artifacts everywhere else.

Answer 5

Sunset Meet

Westbound and eastbound trains meet just before sunset on March 8, 2014 at the Wheeler siding in northern Alabama located about halfway between Memphis and Chattanooga on what was then the Memphis District - East End of the Norfolk Southern Alabama Division. The division has since been renamed as the North Gulf Division.

_{Canon EOS 5D Mark II + EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS @ 24mm, ISO 640, f/4, 1/4000}

There was a lot of pushing and pulling using the raw image data to get the final result above. All adjustments, including significant tone mapping, were global and equally applied to the entire image.

Compare the above to the more or less straight out of camera result re-created using Canon's older Digital Photo Professional 3 software to apply the fairly generic in-camera settings at the time the image was captured.

Answer 6

A white screen

A picture of my phone's screen while it was displaying a completely white screen, taken with a microscope at my work. In the bottom right I have left the scale. We can really appreciate the "RGB" pixels here, all turned on to form white.

Although this is not a sophisticated composite or filtered image, the manipulation is the high amount of zoom, as we would never think of this as a picture of a white screen.

Camera: Keyence VHX-7000

Answer 7

"Uncork your Joy"

Please pardon the Christmas card format - but this is one of my many Photoshop projects. The image was assembled in November 2017. Separate images were taken with a Sony Alpha 65. There are actually five images in the card - one for each letter, one for the bottle and one for the red drapery background.

The letters are made of wood and were photographed at ISO-200 and 1/2000 sec exposure using a burst mode that shot around 10 pictures per second. (It took about 100 images to get the three I used.) To get the splash, I dropped them in a 20 gallon fish tank with a black background while shooting, timing the burst to start just before they hit the water.

The jug picture was taken at ISO-200 and 1/4000 sec while the jug was emptying of water. I used a black background here as well to allow subsequent cropping.

The rest was photoshop magic.

Answer 8

Title - Trophy Heart

This is one of the images from a project I was doing in 2018 to create a compelling image of what it might be like to have one's heart taken and put on a shelf. This photo was created by using Photoshop to combine two images - one of a trophy shelf with two trophies and a bottle full of red liquid, and one image of a heart pendant suspended in a bottle of red liquid while flour sifted down through the liquid.

All images were taken with a Sony A65. The shelf image was taken at ISO 100 and 1/125 sec. using a tripod and flash to get the back shadows and red bottle on the back wall. (I actually built a shelf just for this project.) The standalone heart image was taken at ISO-400 and a 1/2 sec exposure using a tripod and a top-down light.

I aligned the heart on the bottle and did some magic Photoshop blending to get the final effect.