This isn't the place to talk about why; perhaps one of these days I'll do that. For now, I'll show you how the Last Supper image went together.

One decision I had to make was to produce this image for the web, which meant that I was restricted to a small viewing area (actually, 540 by 375 pixels) while working with a large subject. Sacrifices had to be made, and the idea of gathering around a table was an immediate casualty. There wasn't room for a table!

I had all these lily photographs. I needed to stay aware of their symbolic value as well as their appearance as flowers; simply using lilies in place of people wouldn't say anything in particular. That led to other decisions, which I'll talk about some day in a discussion on creating strong images.

I started with a background; since I was working with a subject that has been painted several times, I wanted a "painterly" background. See the background tutorial for techniques; here, I used dark greens over dark blue. Depending on the color accuracy of your monitor, you may not see much variation in color, but it is there. (View in Photoshop if your browser isn't doing it justice. Or maybe it's just my slightly defective green color vision. In any case, it's supposed to be subtle.)

The next step was to arrange the lilies around something, which eventually became a pit of fire. I had to pare it down it somewhat to fit with the arrangement of lilies.

The next step was adding the lilies. With the exception of one pair in the back row, each of these flowers came from a separate image, so I had to cut each flower out from its background before copying it here. Again with the exception of the pair, each lily is also on a separate layer, which will become important later on. The lilies at the bottom are on the top-most layers, with lilies proceding downward in layers as they proceed towards the back of the ring. This lets the lilies overlap in a way that produces a sense of depth.

Let's hide the lilies for a second and go back to the fire.

I've added a duplicate layer of the original fire, which extends upward from the area shown earlier. This copy has been given an "ocean ripple" and an opacity setting of 50%. I also added a layer mask, so that I could carefully blend the edge of the flame with the background, and to add further control over the opacity of this layer.

See the partial transparency tutorial for more of an explanation of this use of duplicate layers, although there's a more direct example of the same technique later on.

The next step was adding the lightning. This needed all the tricks I disucss in that tutorial, especially doing the lightning in a layer mask so that the rest of the layer would be transparent. It took several tries to get a lightning pattern that fit the composition, and additional editing to trim out artifacts and stray lightning that didn't fit. Specifically, I wanted the lightning coming out of the pit and flowing off the top.

Again, note the use of layering, so that the lightning is visble over the lilies in the background, but is obscured by the lily in the lower right. This visual cue helps confine the lightning to the pit. (Note that most cues for depth perception do not rely on binocular vision.)

Next I clipped the fire lily to place in the "Christ" (or anti-Christ, take your pick) role. The idea of placing this figure above, and disconnected from, the disciples was derived from Salvidor Dali's Sacrement of the Last Supper, a stunning painting which is worth a trip to the Smithsonian.

(No, it's not a direct derivation; seeing Dali's painting gave me the freedom to find ways to make the central figure of this work into something "larger than life.")

That completes a high-level view of the Last Supper. Because we've been working with a reduced image, some of the details of what I've talked about will be more visible on the full-size image, regardless of your monitor's gamma correction.

Because of the complexity of this image, there's been a certain amount of hand-waving as well, particularly over the issue of extracting a dozen lilies from as many other images. Other times I've referred to other tutorials, some of which exist mostly to support this one.

But if you still have questions about this, please let me know.