Photochop

Um, my projects are lame, but I learned a lot from them, and I had fun doing it, so hopefully that will account for something. I actually did two, because I got frustrated with the first one (The Bush/Cheney one).

The first picture I took in Sterling, Illinois of Sarah and her horse, Bill. Things just seemed too serene, and I came across another photo I took of my ADHD nephew when I took him to the Orpheum on his visit from Texas. The velociraptor seemed a fine addition to the pastoral scene with Sarah and Bill. 

The challenges in this project were not the lassoes or image placement. I already had some practice at the other project on using the history brush. The hardest parts were dealing with the lighting and angling of where the 'sunlight' was falling, as well as the 3-D grass coming up behind the velociraptor's feet, in between its toes, and in front of the claws. I also realized after I completed what I was doing that I should have made some shadows. 

As for the other project attempt:

Since I work in the news biz, I have an account on an image server, from which I pulled two pictures – one of Dubyah and one of Dick – that are listed above. The third image I took at the Metropolitan museum in NYC around St. Patrick's Day. I created a few layers: one each for the lassoed heads of Cheney and Bush, a master copy layer in the event I messed up (which I did several times), and the final layer was for the text.

For the heads (or 'busts': note the play on words) I had to do some resizing, rotating, and light angling on them. As I put them over the background layer, I zoomed in and used the history brush tool and cleaned up around the edges of the heads. Cheney's glasses were the toughest part. Their heads didn't fit that well on the original busts, so I had to make patch sampling of the background in order to cover up the protruding sculpture, which was on the background layer, and tougher to 'fix.' 

On the text I used the eyedropper to get a compatible color tone that would be cohesive with the rest of the scene. The text had to be resized, rotated, stretched, skewed, and put into perspective. After I rasterized the text, I used a Gaussian blur (at a low rate) to blend the text into the wall.

I wish I could have figured out how to pixellate Cheney's head to blend it in a bit better. The work is severely amateur, I know, I'm not trying to kid myself. But the lessons came in really handy, especially when working with the multiple layers. I also really got to learn the history brush and lighting effects pretty well. As for the text, I know that we were told to use minimal textual interference, but I wanted to practice using it on a 3-D surface that was heading towards a vanishing point (see: Berger/McCloud). I got the angles and stretches pretty close, but the words still look light a slightly crooked picture.

Hey, I'm a writer and an amateur photographer. My strengths are in color saturation and digital development. I think I'll post some of my work in another blog entry.