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Time now for you to demonstrate your wonderful creativity with some
compositions of your own! I expect you to create at least two original images.
 | At least one should be an advertisement, complete with text. It
could advertise, for example, a holiday destination, your local village (take some photos yourself and scan them in
school), a brand of car, of toothpaste, whatever you like! It could even be a magazine
cover, complete
with your face! |
| At least one image should be a montage of several images combined
into one. See further down this page for advice on making montages. |
| At least one image should demonstrate your skill in making accurate selections. |
Follow the 'Student Work' links above to see some work by my Mexican students
(mostly age 17-18) of previous years. Do you think you can do better? Prove it!
You are welcome to use images downloaded off the internet, but you will find
that they are usually rather small compared to the ones you have used in this
course. To find images of a good size, try searching for 'wallpaper' - for
example you could do a search for 'wallpaper cars' if you want large
pictures of cars. If you find any good sites for FREE wallpaper then
please let me know.
You may also choose to work with large images from my 'image banks'
at the top of this page.
Making a montage
It's likely that you will often want to combine several images into
one to create a 'montage'. I don't expect you to download any of these
pictures below and manipulate them - I DO expect to find this page useful when you are
making your own montage pictures. The image below is a montage of several
photographs, all taken in Bali, Indonesia. (Bali is a small Hindu enclave in
this otherwise Muslim country, and it also happens to be the most photogenic
place I know). It is intended to be an ad for the traditional dancing that goes
on in the town of Ubud (pronounced 'oobood', in the center of the island.
 I
spent a long time on this picture, so I hope you like it! It was made by
combining elements from the pictures at the bottom of this page. Look at the
picture below and you will see what I was trying to avoid - can you spot
the difference (apart from the size, duh)?
 The
difference is in the skirt of the man at the top left - I wanted to avoid the
sharp edge at the bottom of the skirt but the original picture stopped there, so
I made the skirt fade away for the final image. Here are the details of how the
image was put together, including how to fade the edges of components (I also
faded the bottom of the monstrous figure, top right).
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I wanted a background that would be interesting and colorful
but not distracting - by blurring (Gaussian blur) the photo below I was able
to keep the greens that are so typical of the island, while eliminating the
distracting detail. I also darkened the lightest parts of the background
using the curves control, so that the background would not contain any
boring white areas.
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Then I carefully selected shapes from each of the other
pictures, using first the magnetic lasso and then tidying up the selection
by using the regular lasso tool to add to or subtract from the initial
selection. I used a setting of 1 for the feathering to soften the edges
slightly.
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I copied and pasted the selections into the master image, on
top of the background, creating a stack of layers.
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To modify each layer, I clicked the name of the layer and
then used Edit>Transform ... to change the size of each selection
and in some cases to flip the selection horizontally.
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So far, the selections still have hard edges - to get the
faded edges you saw in the final image I choose the appropriate layer (the
dancer stabbing himself while in a trance, for example), then switched to
Quick Mask mode. I applied a linear gradient to the quick mask, so that the
protective mask would be thick (darker red) towards the bottom of the
picture. Then I returned to standard mode, copied the selection (the entire
layer) and pasted it again, knowing that the unmasked areas of the copied
layer would be copied and pasted as opaque, and the masked areas would be
copied and pasted as somewhat transparent. Clever stuff!
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I deleted the two layers that I had copied and pasted to
give the faded effect, leaving the faded layers.
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Moved each image into its final position with the move tool.
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Added titles and effects (Layer>Effects)
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| I saved a PSD version in case I wanted to make any changes,
then flattened all the layers into one (Image>Flatten Image) in
order to be able to save the picture in jpeg format. (It's necessary to
flatten the image in version 5, but not in version 6.)
If you would like to study Photoshop in more detail, try the official
tutorial that was installed with Photoshop - the tutorial folder should be
located in Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop\Training. The tutorial is in PDF format so
you will need Acrobat Reader in order to do the lessons.
Also, HP (Hewlett-Packard) offers free tutorials in many types of software,
sometimes including Photoshop. Visit http://www.hplearningcenter.com/
for more. 
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