image lab
my surreal worlds
photography, edits, composites, and remixes where the ordinary becomes cosmic.
1. adjusted photographs
Four photographs I shot and then refined in Photoshop, adjusting exposure, color balance, contrast, and mood. Each pair shows the original on the left and my edit on the right.
This started as a snow globe on a shelf and a phone camera. Nothing special, just a small object catching bad light. What I wanted was the feeling of being inside it, so I painted over the photograph instead of just adjusting it. I washed the sky into deep violet and blue, tinted the little trees with pink and mint so they’d catch imaginary light, and softened the whole frame into a haze until the plastic stopped looking like plastic. The tower in the middle blurs like a memory of a skyline rather than a model of one. It’s the same scene, but repainted into the dream I saw when I looked at it, snow suspended, everything glowing slightly, the ordinary object finally as magical as it felt in my hand.
Pigeons are the easiest thing in the world to walk past. That was the point. I wanted to take the most ordinary bird on the most ordinary stretch of pavement and treat it like it deserved a second look.The original on the left is honest but flat, grey light, muddy greens, the bird almost lost against the ground. In Photoshop I lifted the exposure and rebalanced the colour, pushing the grass into something richer and cooling the shadows so the pigeon separates from the pavement instead of blending into it
I sharpened the wing so the feather detail reads, and warmed the highlights just enough that the whole frame feels lit rather than found.What I was chasing wasn’t realism, it was that slightly heightened, almost-too-vivid quality where a real photograph starts to feel imagined. The edit doesn’t invent anything that wasn’t there. It just turns the volume up until an ordinary moment tips over into something a little surreal, a pigeon caught mid-motion like it knows it’s being watched.
I shot this in the flat middle of the day, the worst light for a portrait: harsh sun, hard shadows, sweat on his forehead, and the exhaustion of a long shift written across his face. In the original, he’s half-swallowed by that glare. What I wanted was to keep the tiredness honest but give it somewhere to look.
In Photoshop, I worked the two halves of him differently. On the shadow side, I deepened the darks and let the fatigue sit there, the weight of the day, the part that’s worn down. Then I lifted and warmed the side turned toward the sun, softening the harshness into something gentler, a light that reads less like heat and more like hope. Same face, same moment, but now it’s a man caught between exhaustion and the possibility of a better day, rather than just squinting into a hard afternoon.
The edit is subtle on purpose. I didn’t want to erase who he is or where he was standing. I wanted to find the dignity that the raw light had flattened out.
The original is a busy street, a school bus half-hidden behind trees, cars parked around it, a driver at the window, pigeons scattered across the road, a lamp post cutting through the middle of the frame. Too much competing for attention. What I wanted was stillness: the bus alone, like the only thing that ever mattered in the picture.
In Photoshop I cleaned the scene down to that idea. I removed the lamp post so nothing interrupts the line of the street, swept the pigeons off to the edges so the road reads as calm and open, and took the driver out of the window for his privacy, so the bus becomes an object rather than a moment someone’s caught in. Then I sharpened the bus itself so it sits crisp against the softer greens behind it, the one clear thing in a hazy afternoon.
It’s a lesson in subtraction. The photograph didn’t need more added to it, it needed everything unnecessary taken away until only the subject was left.
2. He Was A Fairy Remix
Dear Pixel Hearts, As you may know, my name is Amar, and in this surreal cosmic composite featuring a Touareg man with fairy wings, I wanted to honor a heritage that feels deeply ancestral to me, one that reflects the historical journeys of Arab and nomadic cultures throughout Africa. When observing these nomadic cultures, I have always seen a profound depth in their eyes, which inspired me to make their luminous purple eyes the striking focal point of the piece. Streams of air escaping his ears represent both the searing heat of the desert they traverse and the magical stories they hear throughout sub-Saharan countries, evoking a light, knowing grin.
To symbolize his deep connection with nature, I integrated organic elements like a mushroom, a butterfly, and a unicorn into the cosmic expanse, while the intricate fairy wings draw inspiration from a favorite children’s show, The Winx.
Bringing this vision to life in Photoshop required an intensive process spanning more than 15 hours of digital painting, advanced masking, multiple layers, and complex blending modes. The glitter, facial gem, and animal elements proved the most challenging parts, requiring meticulous care to achieve overall visual coherence on my first attempt at such a detailed composition.
masking
Cutting the subject cleanly from the background, refining edges, and adding the element that changes everything , mushroom butterfly, and of course GLITTER.
color logic
Matching the color temperature of every element so they feel like one world.
light-matching
Adding shadows and highlights so the fairy wings truly belong to the scene.
3. She Finds Her Space – The Remix
In crafting She Finds Her Space, born from the intimate truth that when life feels bland, you simply have to make your own world, I began with Jessica Felicio’s evocative 2018 Unsplash portrait, Melanin Goddess, honoring its original celebration of Black womanhood by transforming its solitary, stark orange field into a dreamy, starlit universe where she becomes the magical protagonist of her own cosmic story.
Using a meticulous layer mask, I gently separated her from her original backdrop without disturbing a single pixel, welcoming her into a whimsical realm filled with a deep-field starplate, floating jellyfish that drift like soft glowing lanterns, a gentle cosmic whale, a timeless hourglass, a fluttery butterfly, cozy floating lamps, a playful UFO, and a watchful iris moon acting as a tender, celestial guardian. Because her original portrait was kissed by a single side-light, every single magical element required careful orchestration: I flipped assets, hand-painted directional shadows onto separate multiply masks, and shifted the warm studio tungsten toward a dreamy, cold ambient blue using tailored curves and color balance. By bathing the entire composition in glowing overlay modes and a unified global gradient map, I wove together a tiny, cozy pocket of quiet starlight and blooming life amidst a vast, cosmic sea, turning digital remediation and modularity into a deeply poetic sanctuary where she rests peacefully in her own magnificent power.
Can you find how these images were integrated?? 🙂
What Photoshop taught me
Working deeply within Photoshop taught me a profound, meditative kind of patience, revealing that true digital artistry demands an obsession with detail where hours quietly dissolve and the smallest touch changes everything. The hardest skill wasn’t mastering any single tool; it was learning to make ten unrelated images belong in the same world. I quickly realized that light, color, and shadow are the glue that binds a fractured dreamscape together, whispering harmony into chaos. Once I understood that, the surreal started to feel real, turning a blank digital slate into a cozy, breathing sanctuary where imagination and reality finally melt into one.
4. Game time
Here is a little game from the good old times that might trigger your envy to run toward new things
arrow keys · wasd · swipe