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.
