Click for full size (it's big).

We were having all sorts of fun taking these pictures in the studio, and at some point we realized that we had a lens flare. A real, honest-to-goodness lens flare (I don't think I'd ever seen one before that wasn't done in Photoshop). We rearranged the lights a little to get rid of it, but not before taking advantage of it.

Taken using a Phase 1 back and a Hasselblad lens. They are a little bit older (for cameras), so any noise in the shadows are a result of the camera itself, not because of the file size or type. The background was a crinkly type of black fabric, which shows a little bit in the pictures.

You can see the lens flare in the picture on the right. It's very faint - when we first took the picture, it was much brighter on the computer screen. I had to fiddle with the curves a bit to get things to come out.

I did find a bunch of tutorials online on how to make energy balls, or fireballs, etc, but I wasn't terribly thrilled with the lot of them. Most of them called for some kind of lens flare, but that looks so cheesy. I ended up using one anyways, because there wasn't anything else that could make a glowy ball so well. It didn't end up cheesy, though, because it doesn't look like a lens flare.

First thing I did after making the lens flare (105mm prime) was mask the layer so that it didn't get too out of hand. Just a small, glowy white ball. Then I changed the color - I'm partial to blue and purple, and the blue fit for this. The layer mask meant that I could just Hue/Saturation the whole thing, since everything I didn't want to change was masked out. Then I went into the Liquify filter and just... smeared things around. Made it look all cool and swirly. Duplicated it and swirled it again, a different way. I ended up having three of these, with the top two set to overlay so they would all stack.

Last thing I did (for the magic part) was to paint some faint, blue shadows on anything that the blue light would have been shining on, i.e. fingers & face.

Since I was doing stuff in Photoshop anyways, I also touched up the tattoo (so it wouldn't be quite as shiny and would look more like a tattoo) and blended the ear line a little bit.