Plastic Tuesday

I used the tiny Tuesday Challenge as an exercise in photo-stacking and chose to use a tiny plastic butterfly that is in my wife's jewellery box and set it on a black velvet background.It is about a centimetre in width and 3-4 millimetres deep.

I had masses of problems lighting it appropriately  as the light reflection tended to over-expose and in the end I used a gang of LED lights through a diffuser with a slight throwback of a reflector on the opposite side. The focus stack was of 22 shots and Photoshop seemed to cope with this OK. I did not need to go and get  cup of tea in the meantime. 

However, the black velvet background was a big mistake as I then had to paint out all the tiny hairs and dust the photo-stack had picked up. In the end I took a selection round the butterfly and filled it with black and then added back a bit of noise to make it look a bit more realistic.

Not a riveting image but I suppose I have learnt a lot along the way