Several people have asked me how we created this year’s Christmas card. All it requires is a little bit of creativity and some skill with Photoshop. Here are the steps I took to create the image.
First you need a willing model, in this case Harriet, a Christmas tree, a cool skirt, a pair of angel wings and a digital camera.
Next step is to tweak the development settings slightly in Lightroom and export the image to Photoshop. Once in Photoshop I ran a couple of RAD actions on the image. First Sparta at 50% and then Bullet Tooth, also at 50%.
Add a little Ying/Yang to pull out the detail in the wings and to darken the background. A slight adjustment in levels followed by some cloning to fill in the fire and to add some more lights on the tree :-)
Add 3 layers of textures at various opacities to achieve desired looked. Final image adjustment with a curves layer to reduce the red dominance and to add contrast.
Finally add the “Angel” text at 25% opacity. Here is the finished image next to the original.
by Stewart Randall
show hide 1 comment
link to this post email a friend