Thursday, October 16, 2008

Week 7 - Compositing

So I was going through a collection of the pictures I've shared with this class and came up with three designs I'd like to share.

In this first one, I simply used the magnetic lasso tool in order to select the red eft from one picture so I could drag it over to a second picture. I then used the Rectangular Marquee tool in order to erase part of the eft's torso so it appeared to be coming from behind the left hand wall. I tried to work its tail in, but in the end I just hid the layer. Lastly, I used the clone stamp tool to round out its face.

In this second picture I wanted to play around with filling in the center of a sunflower. First I used the Elliptical Marquee tool to clear of the flower's center. Next, I once again used the magnetic lasso to trace the flower's outline. Then I dragged the petal outline over to the arrow hole of Doune Castle in Scotland. However, this one move left the castle wall filling in the borders of the picture, so I used the clone stamp tool to expand the the countryside and white sky to the photo's outer corners. It still looked pretty bland, so next I copied the sunset from my Oregon beach picture and the clouds from over Franconia Ridge in NH. It's not the greatest, but two countries and three states are represented.

This final idea came at the last minute and I was too impressed with the result not to include it in this week's post. I came across this picture I have of a statue near Buckingham Palace in London. In the original, the form is so dark that it's essentially a silhouette, so I used the magic wand tool to select the negative (black) space and deleted it's contents. Next I moved in the image of the hazy trees and placed it behind the first layer. Very simple creation, but I feel it's very effective.

Two things I'd like to point out: for each of these I created a new background layer and in a few instances I drew a selection area and then used Select/Inverse in order to protect my selected area from changes.

6 comments:

Rach said...

Wow Jay - these are amazing! I am glad that you wrote down how you did them. I hope you don't mind my printing it off (your photos with how you did it). The colors work really well together and the pictures look like they are the same tone (warm/cool). Did you have to adjust that or did you pick pictures that were already in the same warm/cool tone family to put together?

Mallory said...

I agree, these pictures are amazing! Im glad you added the last one in too. My favorite is the sunflower, that was very creative to incorporate the sky, this could definitely be a cool advertisement for something! Nice job!!

Christina said...

I agree...These are amazing! The sunflower takes my breath away! Great work!!

Addrienne Marie said...

These look great! I love the sunflower, it's like a fantasy looking through it and seeing the sunset. I think the salamander picture is funny, and I love how you used the hazy trees to fill in the statue. Did you try feathering the edges at all with the last photo?

Travis M said...

Jay I think the statue was a great idea. Tha absolute reverse of anything I thought of. It is a really beautiful piece of art, and the salimander is too much fun.

Anonymous said...

Very nice job, at first glance it looks like the poor eft is in jail. The framing on him and that sunflower photo exceptional. The invert/reverse aspect is definately the way around a lot of photoshop issues sometimes with selection. Very good point.