Project 3...walt

Not so successful. Several problems:

First...had to figure the pixel thing out. Had a great deal of confusion trying to adjust the "size" of my images relative to each other. Finally figured out that it's all about pixels. My background images were "smaller" than my camping images. Had to upsample the background and moonscape - before layering on the little stuff. Then this made the images humongous...and slowed down my machine to a crawl. Had to "smaller-ized" the attached image in this blog with Fireworks to get it to upload. What I learned the hard way: pixel control.

Next problem: what exactly is a mask? Does it define what is shown or what is blocked? Still don't know. Just kept clicking until something worked.

Started with the moonscape. Easy - it had a black background. Did a quick mask and somehow got it to work. Used the brush tool to clear out some bad spots. At this point, I think I should have modified the edges. Realized at the end that it was too late.

Then started on the small images. I think I used the Color Range on one and the background eraser tool (like in the video) on another. For the latter, I ended up later having to use the polygon tool (my favorite by far...anything blown up enough has straight sides) to clean up stray pixels.

Tried adjusting the tents. Needed to more closely match the washed out moonscape: Used Image/Adjust/Hue&Saturation...lowered saturation and increased lightness a bit. Can't remember how much.

Tried Filer/Blur/Gaussian to blur edges. Not sure if it helped. Again: should have taken care of the edges earlier.

The moonscape was lifted from some NASA site...and had crosshairs. Use the healing brush to eliminate them.

Tried adding some Drop Shadow. Marginal success.

Threw in a title since others were doing so. This took some time to figure out. Remember that "pixel control" comment? Well in the images I set up, the size of the type had to be about 450 pt. I kept trying things like 16 or something (normal for apps like Word)...which I couldn't see.

Actually, it looks pretty corny.

-w