Cameraless Photography - Flatbed Scanner

What most people fail to realise is that the scanner can be use as a camera.  It has a depth of field, admittedly a small one, in fact only about one inch.  For this exercise a selection of items were placed directly onto the glass. 

The first operation should always be to duplicate the layer, cmd J (control J on a PC).  Next a Curves adjustment layer was used to boost the contrast.

The hold the viewer’s attention in the center of the image a edging layer was created. This is an empty layer, using the post-it note button, which is then set to soft light on the blending drop down menu.  The foreground colour should be set to black and white.  Select the graduated tool, under the paint bucket, ensuring that it is showing black to transparent on the menu bar.  This is denoted as black to a chequer pattern.  Click just off the side of the image then drag and release the cursor about one third into the picture area.  Repeat this on all four sides.

Next create another edging layer, but this time drag the cursor in from each corner.  

The colours are a little more intense than I had intended so to reduce this I created a black and white adjustment layer.  Once created this was dragged below the edging layers.  The yellow and red sliders were lightened slightly for this image to reduce the intensity of the leaf.  Once happy with the colours the blending options press Cmd and E (control E on PC) to merge the adjustment layer with the image below it then set the blending option to screen.  The opacity slider can be used to adjust the amount of muting of colours.