This was another one I created. I took the photo in the living room then cut my daughter out and created an all-new fantasy scene, she loves fairies. I also had to create a new shadow of her body to give it realism, on the bottom right side of her body. When all was done, I added a crackled top overlay to make it seem like an old canvas. Again, this was made up of many, many layers.

I take photos of all sorts of strange things, to keep as bits that I may one day use to create a fantasy image. Things like tree bark, floor textures, wall textures, torn paper etc. and then I take pieces out of photos I may have taken in the past, such as the distance forest line, or a clump of grass, or small group of little flowers. All to keep on file to pull out at some future time, to create a fantasy scene.

I must say that this is one of my most favourite images. We have a large canvas print of it on the wall.

This is another example and this had about 20 layers blended together. My children wanted to make a snow man, late in the season. We did not have much snow, so after trying to make a traditional snowman, we had to settle for a clump of snow, which was all that we could gather from the sparsely spread about snow in the yard.

I suggest that we make this into a snow woman instead and then my daughter wanted her to have a baby snowman, so we just had enough to make that before we ran out of useable snow. It looked terrible with all the bare grass about, so later I began to create a winter scene in which to place the snow woman and baby and the children. This one took a while, but I had great pleasure in creating everything in all the layers.

As an example, the fence was one layer, then the scraggly tree behind it was another layer, then the house was another layer, as was the larger tree by the house. Then the trees on the left were several individual layers and reindeer and sled another. The pathway that goes off behind the snow woman and the trees behind the house were all different layers, plus more.

These are things that I could never have achieved in the old days with film and dark room work. It is this sort of PP work that makes today's technology fun in photography and Post Processing, at least for me. Oh, and it was a lot of effort to learn how to do all this in Photoshop, but for me, time well worth invested.

The camera does not capture what the brain sees through your eyes. It is only an approximation with differences in dynamic range, color reproduction, detail, sharpness, contrast, local adaptation, ... Why not bring your captured images closer to what you actually see? There is just as much science and art in Post Processing as there is in capturing an image. Being able to enhance an image without making it look over processed takes skill, knowledge and the eye of an artist. The Post Processing tools and training are readily available to any photographer who wants them. Why not use them?

I truly can relate to your views, as Post-Processing does make the image turn into a Photograph and not just a snap shot. When I started High School my Parents gave me a Type Writer where the keys were in Hebrew. They told me that one day as I got pretty good at typing, that it would become an extension of how to convey a message. I cannot say that I hate Post-Processing as it just comes with the territory. I used the DarkRoom during High School, but I also got banned from using it unless their was a Teacher nearby. I got caught with this girl in the Darkroom and we were developing, except it was a different kind of Retouching, and our parents were pretty mad but I have to say that it was fun.