DRAMA LLAMA
Continuing with my wildlife series, I decided to create a portrait of a llama image that I captured during one of my wildflower shoots last spring up near Burnet, Texas. I often travel for 6 or more hours in the spring driving through the back roads looking for fields of bluebonnets, indian paintbrush and other Texas flowers. Sometimes I come upon a ranch with interesting livestock. This particular day, I found a yard with about 6-8 llama and several burrows. The llama were very friendly and came right over to the fence to visit.
I cut the llama out of the background from the image below and then repainted the edges of the fur on the mask. I cloned and painted back in the fur colors after selecting the mask. I used my usual recipe in NIX software of Tonal Contrast, Pro Contrast and Detail Extraction to lift shadows and give the fur maximum details prior to adding a painting effect. Topaz impressions is used for a very gentle painting process with settings I designed, this time my fine brush scrumble at about 65% strength.
After topaz I begin my dodge and burn techniques and adjustment layers to modify the lighting. I also used my "check layers" for luminosity and saturation and made adjustments using levels and curves layers. I added a high pass filter at the end to sharpen and I also used my edge blurring technique to soften just about a 0.4 px edge and feather it into the background to remove that cutout look.
A final softlight/blur finish gives it just the right amount of pop. I did not color grade this one because I didn't blend multiple images together and really didn't need it.
Background color selection again was based on the color wheel. Orange and Purple and Yellow and Blue are all complementary color to each other. Staying with the colors in the llama as an orange and yellow palette, the blue/purple background seemed the right mix.
