Over the next few nights, I'm doing the final compilation of the slideshow history of Baltimore's neo-burlesque superhero Trixie Little. All of the images will be burned onto a DVD to be shown at the beginning of this Saturday's Valentine's Day Cabaret at the Creative Alliance.

Here are some of the Photoshop layers for an illustration of Trixie flying on a trapeze. The original photo (1) was shot in Trixie's studio a few weeks ago. I cut a pen tool path around Trixie (2), which is shown here as an alpha channel mask. Then I could easily cut Trixie to a new layer, and place a blurred background image of blue clouds behind her (3). Since the slideshow is supposed to look like a black and white silent film, I did a mode change on the image to colorize it in sepia tone (4). To give the image a aged feel, I created a mask (5) that would let me darken the edges of the frame for the final image. (6).

It's good to know I can still navigate around Photoshop pretty quickly. The hard part of this project (besides the tedious work of making the masking paths in Photoshop) was doing the photo shoots with live actors and also rounding up all of the extra prop elements to photograph as add-in elements.

- mike lee - langley park, md