Project 2 — Becca.

Originally I was going to invent a Halloween-themed composite, since it's my favorite holiday, but the images I found for it were on my thumb drive — which has gone missing. So this afternoon, I started over.

First, I went looking for pictures of cats. I had originally intended to find a black cat, because my old photos of my own cat are low-quality and not really worth tinkering with. However, this wild-looking brindled cat caught my eye.


The cat's pointed face and imperious stare reminded me of a statue of Bastet, so I decided to put it into an ancient Egyptian background. I found a beautiful shot of the Great Temple of Abydos which was perfect for the piece.


Selecting the cat and moving it over to the new environment was the hardest part of this project. The Quick Selection tool was not very good at picking up the fine details of the cat's coat and whiskers, so I had to go over the selection about twenty times to get every detail I wanted. The shortcut keys (Shift to add to the selection, and Alt to remove from it) made this much easier. I also used Refine Edge to make sure the selection would blend better against its background, but I had to adjust the settings suggested in Lesson Four, because the temple background is much lighter than the underwater image used in the example.

Once I had put the cat down in the temple image and proportionally resized it, I used the Burn and Dodge tools to edit the shadows in the cat's fur, making them match the direction of the shadows in the background. I decided not to use a blur filter, because the foreground was already slightly blurry as compared to the detail on the wall and the cat's coat. The cat had a slight orange cast, so I went into the Hue/Saturation menu and tweaked it more toward yellow.

The shadow of the cat on the floor I had to paint in with a black brush, and then lower the brush's Opacity to blend in better. I think I need more practice with the direction of lighting — the result looks more mystical than it does realistic, as if the cat's eyes and face were catching more light than they should. However, I like the result — the cat makes an appropriately ominous guardian of mysteries.


(The original images I used were already set up for the web, so I only needed to optimize the finished composition. I also went in and edited the metadata on the stock images so I wouldn't lose the source credits.)