This is the 1.25:1 aspect ratio of the original.
To start off, I had no intention in using this technique when I first thought of this photo; I know many are bored with it and I'm expecting a lot of negative comments about that. I started with the idea of a hanging water droplet causing this sad/happy reversed effect, but quickly realized I couldn't get a water droplet big and round enough to give the happy-face effect. So I thought of putting a large droplet on glass, and then another, and then to make a sun shape out of it, and before I knew it, I was copying the well known technique. I suppose my subconcious led me towards it, having been blown away by it before.
Well, I comforted myself by trying to make it a bit more interesting than the rest. Instead of using a background that's symmetric, or senseless when inverted, I went for an inversion which completely changed the meaning of it.
Designed and printed sad faces in CorelDraw and then created a water pattern using a syringe.
The original image looks very close to this one (to comfort traditionialists like John Setzler) minus the very saturated yellow (I only found average yellow cardboard) and contrast. All other modifications were just for kicks, and because I'm disgustingly perfectionist. NO effects were used; the way I got the drops to be so round is by applying a coat of some toxic hydrophobic chemical from the biology lab which I once used for electrophoresis. I forget what it's called. Same idea as Rain-X(as mentioned in Setzler's tutorial) but I think a bit more powerful.
Post-Processing:
Cloning certain reflections out, slightly reshaping existing reflection (decided to keep some for that plastic happy-face effect), slightly refocusing the pair of big eyes in the center (They were slightly out of focus at the expense of focusing on the droplets themselves), slight gaussian blur on the background instead of removing dust and defects, desaturation of the background (+ color balance to return to yellow) done to remove brownish hue around the black-to-yellow blur, 50%desaturate + color balance of droplets to partially remove chromatic aberration (50% was to keep redish glow of the droplets and maintain some contrast), contrast enhancement (ie slight gamma correction + clipping of input values to clip black regions), cropped out fraction of a drop on the right side which was bothering me.
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