Well, it is one more year behind me and to tell you the truth I couldn't be happier where my life is right now. Ok enough about my birthday because I am still in Columbus so there is not going to be a big party. Not that there should be, after all it is not a cardinal birthday anyhow.
So rather than moping around being away from my dear wife, I will celebrate it with my long promised post on fireworks. After it is all said and done it was a snap. Read on if you want to know the details.
Capture - This is the photographic fun part. I had shot fireworks before but without much success. I went out on my own and it was pretty ugly I must say. This time I had done some research on camera settings and the shots were much more successful.
First step in post was to load a bunch of images into ACR. On each file I boosted the blacks just a bit, hit clarity, saturation, and finally pushed some sharpening. On to Photoshop, in this case Elements. In each image I made a lasso selection and dumped it onto its own layer. Then I bulled each of those selection into one file which placed them on their own layers. So now I had a bunch of fireworks surrounded by blobs of black.
Take a look at the screen capture below:
This was the uber slick part about this process. How to get rid of the background without jacking with the fireworks. Hmm... How about the background removal tool, Duh! With the strength set at 40% the white circle above was one click. So you can see the process went really fast.
Once all the backgrounds were gone, the hardest part was determining how I wanted the layout to look. I have had these images on my laptop for a number o weeks thinking it would be difficult to process all the images. How silly. From start to finish, I think I spent 35 minutes on the process. Definitely some repetitive work but a bunch of fun.
Hey, I am going to enjoy my birthday today, so you all have a greta day and enjoy your weekend.
Cya... Doug
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