I knew precisely how to do it the moment I saw this when researching potential scenes to shoot since I'd done a different sideview mirror shot before:
My friend Jeni came over to direct a Scrabble photo she needed for her friend's wedding gift and the moment she arrived I handed her a shirt to wear, then dragged her down to the parking lot with a TV tray, several shoe boxes, my red emo glasses, and the laptop, on which I'd put a large lizard eye (I couldn't find a giant bloodshot eye straight off, and I liked the lizard eye better. We moved my car to a less crowded spot in the lot, stacked the boxes on the TV tray up against the car, and the laptop on top of the boxes and slightly inside the car window. We had to work quickly since the light was waning - I darkened everything outside the car in post processing, but needed the daylight for the rest of the image. I had Jeni sit as far forward on the seat as she could go since I had to work around the headrest, and made her wear my old red plastic emo glasses. Mucho processing later, I've arrived at something that looks less like a comic and more like a cheesy colorized classic horror flick poster, but it's a tribute, an interpretation, and I think the underlying theme is still there.
Jeni was such a good sport that her kudos deserves its own paragraph. I must issue my apologies to her for cloning out the moles that are so much of her character - but ask those who may balk at it to realize that I am trying to portray a comic, not anything remotely connected to reality. The comic subject doesn't have moles, and therefore neither does Far Side Jeni.
My main problem in editing was that I couldn't get the laptop close enough to the mirror for the eye to completely fill its frame without the laptop making a very serious intrusion on the photo, so the eye had to be resized in a separate layer to fit.
Convert from RAW
Crop
Neat Image
Selected eye in mirror, Copy
Resize photo to 1000 pixels on longest side
paste eye to new layer (eye now is larger than the mirror)
Duplicate background layer
Arrange layers so dup bg is on top of eye layer
Remove mirror content on dup bg
Free Transform: Scale eye layer to fit in mirror
Flatten layer
Cloned out the edge of the laptop visible in lower right corner
New layer: window contents (background elements)
Window layer: levels, duplicate, black/gray gradient on dup layer
adj. opacity of both window layers
Burn aqua light in upper left corner
Burn/sponge/clone on light under model’s chin
Burn around edges of window, mirror, upholstery under window
Flatten Image
Cloned out model’s moles and blemishes
Saturation +30 on entire image
Adj. layer: Curves
Adj. hue and saturation in red channel on shirt only
Adj. layer: Posterize, 30 levels, 50% opacity
Added text to mirror
Flatten Layer
Resize USM
Save for Web
Statistics
Place: 61 out of 80 Avg (all users): 5.5640 Avg (commenters): 5.8000 Avg (participants): 5.3333 Avg (non-participants): 5.6207 Views since voting: 2242 Views during voting: 767 Votes: 289 Comments: 7 Favorites: 0
So dumb that you got voted so low...this was the idea I had but didn't have the time to make it work...you did an awesome job and deserved at least top 10.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
