Photoshop at the Pro Level Part 2

1. PERFECTING THE STEM

Since the apple’s stem was a little roughed-up and imperfect, it drew too much attention to itself. That was easily fixed with the Clone Stamp. But more importantly, because the stem was originally photographed against a dark background, it didn’t separate well—it sort of dissolved into blackness. To fix it, I created a highlight on the left side of the stem to match the position and character of the real highlight on the left side of the apple. I used eight separate layers to do it. I gradually created the effect from areas cloned in from the actual apple highlight. On a few of these layers, I set the Blend mode to Vivid Light or to Linear Dodge to punch up the brightening effect. Normally I would have used Screen to do this, but in this case it created an unfortunate colorizing side effect.