A before and after shot for those interested in the technique.
Firstly I used a pink wallpaper (as my backdrop) with butterflies on, which my wife recently used to line the drawers in my little one's chest of drawers.
Then after some careful lining up of the sunglasses to get one of the butterflies through the glass, I took the shot, being careful to get the flash bouncing off the ceiling behind the sunglasses so that 1) The butterfly would be well illuminated, and 2) the shadow of the sunglasses would fall in front of the image.
Oh...and you have to use manual focus for this one, as the AF sensor would always focus on the glasses and not the butterfly, which is what you want sharp.
After all that you can see in the shot how it looks SOOC (straight out of the camera).
Processing (in Gimp as always)
This is the easy part, as all you doing is using the blending modes between layers.
Take your base copy layer, then duplicate it and then set the blend mode to softlight. This darkens the frame and whitens the lights. The take another copy and set the mode to Dodge.
This now bleaches out all the whites. Using the eraser you can erase everything (on the soft light layer) around the image so there are no distractions. Then erase on the dodge layer to bring the shadow back in, as it would have been washed out.
Focus then on the lens with the butterfly image, again gently erasing so that the butterfly comes through nicely and starts to glow.
Merge your visable layers, and then do an Orton effect. The Orton effect will make everything soft and dreamy, but you will need some areas to be sharp to give the eye a good frame of reference. So again, using the eraser on the "out of focus" layer of the Orton effect, erase the layer so that the sharpness of the butterfly comes back through, and then do the same on the metal butterflies around frames of the glasses. This provides some anchors for the viewer and a bit more pleasing in my view.
Merge your layers, flatter your image, save down to jpg, check your EXIF is intact (important for flickr Interestingness) - Thats it all done.
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