Das Park Tool Wrench

For some reason...I really like light painting this week. Third installment of light painting product shots. I think yesterday's is better...but I do like how today turned out. It's Blue themed (which is copy righted/coined by Park Tools btw). Which is an awesome tool company...btw.

So you know the drill by now, use the iPhone to light paint a couple different exposures and then composite them...blah blah. I'll get to what I did different this time, if you get lost here's the other posts to go back to and read.

I didn't use my iPhone for tonight! I used this mega awesome light my parents got me for Christmas this year. It had like 9 LEDs and is mega bright. I only had 3 second exposures most of the time. I light a cross lighting one, and them just flashed the tool with the light for a second to get that fill for the middle part. To composite them, I used LUMINOSITY masks. wohhh what is that word...mannnn. So...a luminosity mask is basically a mask derived from a specific range of tones that you select from an image. I went into the channels (green to be specific) and messed with a copy of the green channel with levels until I had everything pretty much black except for the PARK TOOL COMANY (or whatever it says). I then selected the highlights (the lettering) and applied it a layer mask. Insta easy mask. Just cleaned it up a bit with a brush and good to go. I later brightened it in Lr with an adjustment layer brush that raised exposure and highlights.

Next, in Ps I mean, I used the same technique with a light trail layer to make a layer mask of just the light trails. I actually did this twice to get sharper light trails in one spot because they were very murky and bleh in the original mask. Just messed with levels in the layer mask and like magic they were sharper and better. I then masked the other light trail layer in the parts I wanted the sharp light trails layer.

Finally, I had to add a little highlight to the tool because I failed at light painting it the whole way up. I made a new layer, made a nice path with the pen tool where I wanted the highlight to be, and used the STROKE PATH feature to make a nice highlight. I then added a layer mask with varying opacity to simulate where the highlight would be dimmer or brighter.

To finish it all off, I made a stamp visible layer and applied a high pass filter to it and set that to overlay. I masked off over the main part of the tool but left the rest alone. This sharpened and intensified the lights of the rest of the image. I think this is pretty much what the clarity tool does.

And oh my word Blogger makes it look terrible >:( Please go look at it on Fb to see how it's supposed to look. This looks horrible...why Blogger...why...

Anywho, see you tomorrow.