Lisa
This image was created from a picture of a dancer in rehersal taken by an amateur photographer. Apart from the brilliance of the choreography, the surroundings were pretty grotty. Being one of those once in a lifetime situations, the snapper simply had to concentrate on the girl and hope for the best. Well, it was OK, except that she appeared to be balancing on the very bottom edge of the frame. The stage and background were even worse in the photo than in reality. Time for some LightWave magic!
I scanned the photo and loaded the resulting jpeg into Photogenics. Here, I created an Alpha channel mask in which everything but the girl was painted black. The girl's pixels were all painted white. This was saved as a jpeg, ready to be used in the compositing of the new picture. To reset the scene, new stage and backdrop objects were created in LightWave and rendered with a plain blue colour using a bright lightsource off to the lower left.
The LightWave render was then used as the first of a two layer composite with the original photo. Using Photogenics, the black & white Alpha channel allows you to magically insert the colour image of the dancer into the new scenario. When the composited image had been saved, it was retouched in Photogenics to create the impression of shadows and to give the backdrop its soft, multi-colour cloud effect. Nice eh?
Lisa (my niece) is a member of the highly praised Phoenix Dance Theatre in Leeds, UK. Before becoming a professional dancer in 2002, she studied at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance and graduated with a first class honours degree.
