Photoshop

This picture took a lot of steps and was a very long process. The first thing I did was work on the subject, which is my dog Toby and the tennis ball. To do this, I began by creating a duplicate background layer, then outlined the subject and selected the inverse. After selecting the inverse, I deleted it, so I ended up with just Toby and the tennis ball. Now that I have the subject isolated, I created 10 more layers by selecting the layer on the layer menu and pressing ctrl-J ten times. So now that I have 11 layers of the subject I am going to use the threshold tool. Starting with the top-most layer, I will use the threshold tool and set it to the lowest number. After setting it there I am going to pick the darkest hue of the color I wanted to use which was a dark navy for me. After, I deleted all of the white, and since I set the threshold at a low number, I am left with a little bit of black and since I have the darkest layer chosen I am going to select the black and change it to that color. I did this by holding ctrl and selecting the thumbnail of that layer, then pressing control backspace. So at this point I am left with a little dark part of the subject and that is it, for the next nine layers. As I went along I will be picking a lighter color to make the selected dark part and will be choosing an increasing number for the threshold. By the last layer, the color selected is the lightest one and is the most of the subject. So by this point by viewing all layers, Toby and the tennis ball are apparent and differing degrees layers of color, like mine is.

            To edit the background, I simply used the stamp filter, just with different colors. To do this I choose the two colors, yellow and orange, because I thought it went nice with the blue. After I just applied the stamp filter and that was it. I didn't end up changing the smoothness or adding any other filters because I wanted the background to be simple.  I liked how my picture came out and am happy with the result, though it took many steps to complete.