I’m losing count, but about 10-12 hours in now I’d say, and a whopping 169 megs. Not quite the 30 gigs of the original, but it’s by far the biggest .psd I’ve ever worked with, and the G5’s can still handle it pretty well too. It would probably kill my laptop if I gave this to it.

So, nearly done and now it’s all coming together quite nicely and looking pretty darn sexy. The spiny plants on the right were taking absolutely ages to cut out, and I was only halfway through, so I cheated a bit and just duplicated the half, flipped one of them horizontally and made whole ones out of that. Whether or not Matsuyama-San does that on a regular basis, I don’t know, but I bet he does. The layer for the tree in the background has had the “multiply” feature applied to it, to seperate the background from the tree, and the contrast has been kicked up to help it along, which is a big help if you’re working with things like silhouettes. Still need to make some adjustments to that, then I’ve got to add some large leaves in the foreground, in the top right hand corner, plus the birds and make some general tightening up, and hopefully I’ll then be all done.

Don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I’ve mostly been using layer masks to cut out all the objects, so that if I need to bring anything back, after going a bit overboard with all the cutting, it’s easy enough to do so.