Kisses

Post-Processing

The stock photography gurus will tell you to "get it right in the camera" when shooting stock, and they're right. In a perfect world with great equipment and great skills I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, in the real world with cheap equipment and no skills you'll end up with shots like this:

The lighting is uneven, it's under exposed, slanted, and shot from a funny angle. I probably should have gotten my lights back out and carefully re-shot it, but at 10:30 at night with a half hour to kill before going to bed I decided to see what I could salvage through post processing:

Step 1: tilt it 1.5 degrees to make it vertical

Step 2: crop and brighten it

Step 3: use a huge white paint brush to remove the background before zooming in to 200% with a small paint brush to clean up the edges 

Okay, now the image is clean but still kind of boring and I don't like how the watch case dominates the composition. So:

Step 4: copy and paste it twice to a new page

Step 5: flip one of the copies so that it looks like it's reflecting itself

Step 6: apply a gradient filter to the bottom "reflected" hand

Step 7: and finally, hit ripple effect for a little watery distortion.

About a 1/2 hour after starting I'm submitting "Time Warp" to a stock site somewhere... 

and am happily off to bed for the night.

Sweet Dreams. 

Jed and The Stones...

No, you can't always get what you wantNo, you can't always get what you wantNo, you can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you just might find
You get what you need  :)