Friday 20 May 2011

Project 25: Blending Body Parts.

This was a project that I'd been looking forward to tackling because it's an area that I've attempted to play around with before but never had much success with so here goes.
Basically what I'm looking at here is creating some Surrealist images, what these are are images that are believable to look at but you know that there impossible in the really world. This kind of imagery has been around alot longer then photography but with modern photography software we're capable of producing some very original photos that in the past you might have only seen in paintings.
What I'm asked to do to begin with is take the hand image on the left and the tool on the right and combined them into one believable image. This is where I'd run into problems before because i could never get the blending quiet right but with the explanation here things went much better. The first job was to open the hand image ,then the tool shot and in this using the selection brush pick out the tool from the background. Next after pasting the tool over the second finger a little re-scaling was need just to fit the two parts together and then the harder work began, first i need to erase the handle of the scissor tool because with it spreading across the fingers it spoils the effect some what. With this done i set the eraser opacity to 20% and began to erase around the base of the tool so as to begin to blend the tool and finger seemingly together. Finally i flattened the layers as i was happy with the result which you can now see below.

I have to say this is by far the best blend I've ever done, i never really played around with the opacity before this course but now can understand the creativity that it give you because of the control over how much of the image below you let through at any time. Where i also have run into problems in the past has been with the consistency of the light when producing work like this, what i mean is that I'd shot one image and then in the next the light wouldn't appear the same and as much as I'd try I'd never seem to get it right but in the next part of the project I'd have to because what I'm next as to do is produce my own Surrealist image.
What i decided i wanted to do was combine a very natural image with something a little less natural so first i captured a few plant images and some wildlife shots of birds and insects. In the end i selected the above shot because i thought I'd be able to alter the petals and centre area in some way.
Next i had to find my unnatural image to add to it, above is the photo i took which I'd use for the central mass of the flower but i also tried to find metallic surfaces that i could then blend into the petals. This i found didn't work very well and i felt i was over complicating the subject a little so in the end i only work on the centre of the flower. It still ended up as a pretty good image as you can see below because it really looks as if the glass marble is part of the plant.
I used the red and yellow marble because of how the reds compliments the yellow so well and keeps the theme of warm colours which using the blue ones would have broke up. I feel that i handled my lighting problems pretty well but I'm still not that happy with this part of the process. This project is defiantly one i plan to come back to and have another crack at because i still feel that i can do something with the petals i just have to find the right image.

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