Project 2 - Courtney Acostagrates

Courtney Acostagrates

Tools Used:
I mostly used the "Quick selection" tool to remove the background from my original image. This took care of mostly everything, and I used the "polygygonal lasso" tool to take care of the rest. I liked using the quick selection tool because it was quick and easy to pick up nearly all the background. I preferred the polygonal lasso tool to the other lassos because I felt that the point-by-point selection method gave me a lot of control over the specific area that I was working on. In this way, I was able to easily round off the gentleman's hat and shoes where the quick selection tool had left some rough edges.

Blending options:
I didn't find that there was a tremendous need to use many blending options. Because I was able to make a clean cut of the image in the forefront, there were very solid clean lines and thus no real need to use anything like the outer glow tool. I did was to utilize the curves and color balance adjustments to give the montage a unifying yellowing color cast. I also re-sized the gentleman with the transformation tool so that their size was better suited to the background. I felt that this created more consistency between the two components of the montage.

Opinion of final product:
I believe that the final montage is relatively believable. I had wanted to blur the foreground image a bit, since it seems to me that it has a somewhat crisper resolution than the background image. Unfortunately, when I attempted to employ this tool to the final image, the blur was applied to all aspects and I was not satisfied with the results. I think the positioning of the two gentleman and the color continuity help improve the believability of the image overall.

Experience:
I really enjoyed this project. I was pleased to find that with some simple resizing and color changes I was able to create a rather realistic montage. I had a few false starts initially, because I hadn't really taken the time in advance to consider how to realistically unify my images. I learned how important planning is in creating montages, which I believe to be an important lesson for all aspects of photo editing and design.