Last weekend I attended a race where I had my coach take a photo of me from a low angle.  This gave me a photo that would be suitable for a “hero image”.

I cut myself and my bike out of the background with Photoshop’s pen tool, duplicated this layer several times, added a mask or two, changed some layers to black and white, changed the layer properties, levels and what not, whacked in a background image of some clouds, rendered some difference clouds for some quick and nasty lightning, adjusted the background colours to mirror those in my bike, blurred it a bit, flattened it then whacked it up here.

Cutting the background out took the longest.  I tend to make lots of little clicks, rather than using smooth curves when doing this, but I am tying to improve my workflow there to speed things up.

In other news, it’s crit season again so I am at races at times when I am not racing, but others are so I’m practicing my action photography.