The Lucis Art Effect Part 2

Continuing on . . .

Here is what the edge artifacts look like:

The edge near the hat is the easier of the two to fix. It can be done just by cloning the forehead area below. But I’m going to start the process by fixing it the same way I will with the harder-to-fix neck shadow. And the same way I will restore the background to a nicer darker black.

I’ll do this by dragging this modified version on top of the original file, and adding a Layer Mask, resulting in the two layers you see here.

By painting on the mask (it looks and feels like you are painting on the image, but with the white rectangle selected in the layers panel, as you see above, you are actually painting on the mask) I blended those areas with the more natural edges on the original layer below. The area by the hat, I used a small brush at 50%. I used a larger brush, but at 25% to blend the neck shadow. The next image shows you the resulting Layers panel and what the mask looks like (greatly magnified so that you can see how I went over the area several times, subtley building up density.

So here is the image with the edges fixed:

Continuing with the same mask, I painted in the background. Below is the image, and what its Layer Mask looks like:

Next, I used Shadow/Highlights (Image—Adjustments) to bring back some highlight details on the chest and abdomen. Here is the result and the settings:

You could stop here, if you like the color version. The next step was a conversion to B&W, a raising of contrast, and elimination of banding in the background—but that’s a tutorial for another day.