Manufacturing Moonlight

As most of you know, I’ve been working on different Lent/Easter images for the past several weeks.  My church has a ”Walk to the Cross” presentation that they do on Good Friday where they display artwork to symbolize different events between The Last Supper and Christ’s resurrection.  I originally thought I would try to do 2-3 photographic montage images but ended up with around 7!  

I had one image of a statue of Christ that I took at a local cemetery that I wanted to use to reflect his time in the garden at Gethsemane the night of his arrest.  I wanted to convey a ‘moonlight feel’ to the photo so I first converted it to black and white and then tried different lighting effects to put most of him in shadow, conveying the nighttime feel I was going for.  No matter what I did, though, it always ended up looking muddy.  Then, last night, I thought, “Why not try a fill layer of yellow to convey the moonglow?” I did that, lowering the opacity and fill amounts, but again…not quite right.  I was starting to give up hope that I was going to be able to figure it out when my finger accidentally hit the slider on the color box and the fill layer moved into the blue spectrum.  Hey!  Maybe I’m on to something here!  Still…the photo looked too stark and I wasn’t sure what to do next. 

I proceeded to try every filter option known to Photoshop and finally ended up adding a diffused glow and that was it!  I think I finally managed to capture the look of someone standing outside underneath the glow of the moon.  I left the color intensity really high for dramatic effect but I’m just thrilled with the end result.  What do you think?  Did I hit my target?