Shy moth part 2 ~ side view

[JBW]

[ajohnw]

Not bad Brian but some may comment about the bright top left corner.

John
-

[JBW]

Not bad Brian but some may comment about the bright top right corner.

John
-

Bright top right corner?

[ajohnw]

I edited my post to left top corner.

There are several ways of dealing with this and a few other points if needed. All in soft light

Duplicate the layer, desaturate and invert. I used average desaturate on this one to lighten the tail of the moth more. Luminosity is more usual. Adjust opacity to suit.

Duplicate this layer and invert it. Adjust it's brightness and contrast until the bright leaf tones down to match the rest. A couple of bright spots will appear so just ignore them.

Add a layer ,mask to this - full transparency. and select it. Use a fuzzy edged white brush to paint over the leaf - say about 1/3 of it's width so that its bold and easy to do. Correct any mistakes by painting black.

Part of the moth is a bit bright. While the mask is selected set the dodge and burn tool to dodge shadows and brush about 1/2 the width of the bright area. and run it over it. You can't go too far and mistakes can be corrected by painting black. Try increasing/decreasing the exposure and also burn mid tones to see what happens. Just paint black again to revert to how it was.

You could also use this brush to tone down the leaf that runs across the moth. I'd say one about 1/2 the width would be easiest for you but this is a bit more delicate than the others.

Add new layer transparent. Set the gradient tool to FG to BG, adaptive supersampling and radial. Click in the middle of the moth and while holding the button down drag to one of the lower left corners. Set the layer opacity as desired. These are usually most effective when reduced to the point where you just fail to notice it. The gradient rate can be reduced by dragging past the image. I'd say this one is about right when stopped at the corner. Just do it again if you don't like it as new ones overwrites the old.

Lastly the spots on the leaf. Easiest way - do a new from visible and select the healing tool. Use a brush about twice the size of the smaller of the brighte spots. Cntrl click by that one and then position the cursor over it and click again. Move to the blodgy one and ctrl click above it and click over the top of it. Ctrl click below it and click on the bottom. Probably need to click again on anything that is left. Context sensitive healing. Been in the GIMP for donkeys years. I believe this can be done onto a separate layer but have never bothered. That is probably the best way to use cloning as mistakes are more likely and the actual clone could be cleaned up separately or even given a layer mask.

Rather than soft light layers see what dodge and burn layers do. They are far more aggressive which can be a help at times but makes them more difficult to set if subtle changes are needed.

The fuzzy edged brushes help a lot with this sort of thing and help ease the task - selecting smooth strokes helps too. Keeping it bold rather than fiddly is often just a case of using the right sized brush and amount of fuzz. Running some of the fuzz past the wanted area usually doesn't have any bad effects.



John
-