Pandora's Box

This is in conjunction with mine and Laura's photoshoot of a month ago, where we posed as mermaids. She started it off using her astrological sign as her theme, and mine was based on the wonders of Photoshop.

I used 5 images total, 2 of which were Laura and I posed separately. The other 3 (the cave, treasure box, and octopus were stock images).

Refresher and technical notes for how I achieved the image:

The cave was once brown, and I converted it to the color you see above mostly using "colorize," under the hue/saturation. But it was also attained by experimenting with duplicate layering and changing the blending modes, such as "multiply" and "luminosity."

I made the octopus image deeper with duplicate layering under the "multiply" blending mode.

I changed the box color from a brownish color to green, with Layer Style Blending Options "Color overlay," "Inner Shadow" and "Gradient overlay."

The contents escaping the box and the fishes were done with brushes, mostly set to light blue, but I did use a "pattern" for one of them under Layer Style Blending Options, and it was a pattern I created sometime ago in the Faerie-reading image.

Lastly, the mermaids were Laura and I posed individually with our hair in buns and garbed in undergarments. We took turns balancing horizontally on a footstool. I covered each of us using a "pattern" taken from fish scales. I changed the colors using color overlay and masked the scales from our arms, head and neck. I tweaked under the transformation option, using "rotate," "scales" and "warp."

For the hair, I used a hair brush for mine, and cut and pasted shots of Laura's hair for hers, using the "scales" and "warp" options from the transformation menu. The waves in our hair were achieved using "liquify" which is an option I learned to use from one of my photoshop books.

And that's it :)