Swallowtail Butterfly (Two Photographs)

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For some time now I have wanted to be able to make modest changes to the backgrounds of my photographs without affecting my subject. There are many ways to do this, some more complicated than others. Here I used MacPhun’s Aurora HDR’s luminosity masking to affect the background. Some color change has come from my use of a levels adjustment in Photoshop, not from the neutral HDR setting I chose. The former technique has real possibilities. Levels and some masking works well in Photoshop, the mask needs to be carefully crafted but it is also a technique I like that can work wonders on a photograph, for example if you want a darker background and lighter foreground.