Clouds & Sand

Natural clouds stripped from the background using bitmap transparency. Sand at the beach with molding and transparency for perspective.

Rich

Rich - Very clever method. Looks good.

Sammy

Cool Rich - more like this please :)

Xtreme is perfect for this sort of thing and can allow you to produce exceptional results from photographs.
The bitmap transparency method Rich has used has become my favorite for adding new backgrounds or foregrounds to my photographs which gives them an entirely new feel.
This was also the subject of a 'Photo Melding Challenge' back in June.

Cool Rich. Reminds me of the surface of Mars.

Beach sand. The only thing I saw to photograph the last time there. This was the effect of the waves washing on the beach and bubbles coming up from the sand as the surf rededed.

The image was perspective molded and bitmap copies made. One image was blurred. The images were overlapped, and linear transparency applied to the top image. The idea is to get an image with the size getting smaller and darker in the back, and blurred to be most blurred in the back.

Rich

The cloud source image and a grayscale inverted copy with tone adjustment. The background needs to be white. The image is used to make itself transparent. In bitmap transparency, the working image white areas will be transparent, and the gray areas will remain. A bitmap copy of the result (true color plus alpha) will produce a gray image with transparency. The the image is recolored to white or whatever is desired.

Rich

pretty cool Rich!

The sky didn't do much for me, but when you played in the sand,... Now that was very cool. I liked how that came out.

John,

You can use the gray image as a mask for the source image. Then you'll have a set of clouds in a transparent grapic.

Rich

For myself, I find it much more fun to just have different types of sky stock on hand and just work it into the drawing. Manipulatiing clouds can be a real pain. You loose the fuzziness.