Sometimes it’s just fun playing with photoshop, yesterday was not one of those days. I had just taken yesterdays baked deliciousness out of the oven and got the idea to make the picture above.

I had already charged up my flash earlier that day, and I started to plan things out. With only one flash I would have to do this in several shots. One lighting me up, one lighting everything else, and one lighting my face from the bottom up.

I imaging you might not start on your own project like this, but I just thought some of you might like to see how I made it.

In the first image I started with adding shadows on the outside of the hands. The picture had a nasty shadow on the wall, and if you look behind my head I forgot to take away a paper used for focusing earlier shots.

Added the same picture on top, brightened it and masked out what was supposed to be dark.

With the third image I took away the nasty shadow behind me. A lot of work went into this mask. Still the final result looks really awful.

I used another layer just to make the wall a little bit brighter right behind me. I also removed the paper using Content Aware.

At last I edited in the fireball/light-thingy. My lack of photoshop skills made me a bit frustrated here, but I am satisfied with the final result.

The finishing touch was made in lightroom, adding some contrast and cropping the picture the way I wanted it.

All in all this picture took me about ten minutes to shoot and three hours to edit. A lot of work, but overall I’m pleased with the result.