This has got to be one of the silliest timewasters I've ever indulged in! I don't think Expert Editing is my thing ;-) It takes me FOREVER.
Our subject is ... in its natural state ... a Great Spangled Fritillary who came visiting yesterday. 3 shots of him, 2 of a hat, and one of a glove. Used my Sigma zoom for the butterfly and my Nikon 50mm for the hat and glove.
Used multiple butterfly images because the song title is plural. Would have been a lot easier if it had been singular!!
PP - converted all from RAW, levels, white balance.
Cloned hat trim to look smoother, desaturated it, dodged it so it would look like a white ribbon on each hat. Selected hats as objects and converted to duotone B&W.
Selected glove as an object, increased brightness and contrast.
Used big butterfly image as my base. Dodged butterfly a bit (mostly eyes). Added shrunken hat, made antennaes into objects so they could stick out of the hat, added shrunken glove. Rotated/skewed additions as needed. Added shadow under the brim of the hat.
Repeated for other butterflies (one just has the hat), then selected them (clothed) as objects and pasted them into the main image. Blurred and shrunk them so they'd look like they were in the background more.
Cloned and touched up about a bazillion things in the background to smooth out all the rough edges from my imprecise object definitions. I am really not good at this! Also connected a couple of stems so nothing was floating in space.
After all was merged and blended, resized, increased contrast, sharpened, added border, blurred forground hat a bit more (looked too sharp to me in comparison to the butterfly face ... different lenses and lighting so not a surprise). Dodged main butterfly some more and then cloned some color onto a bright spot in the flowers. I'm overprocessing this one like crazy ;-)
Originals (noting this for myself, mostly, so I don't forget): butterflies 6, 43 and 54; hats 8 and 15; glove 1.
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