For this assignment, I chose the following three pictures, respectively of a corgi, a blackhole, and fantasy land, from google, and made a wired collage.
I am crazy about corgi so I went directly searching for pictures of corgi, and it inspired me of a dog jumping into an imaginary world, so I decided to use the element of a blackhole and a fantasy land. The following picture is what I made out of them.
I used the picture of the blackhole as background layer and firstly worked with fitting the fantasy land into the black whole. I cropped the picture of the fantasy land into an ellipse and apply an Iris blur filter to blur its edges. I resized the ellipse to fill the blackhole. I also applied a brightness and contrast layer to make the overall color tune brighter and more fancy. I find it quite easy to get this part done, for the blackhole picture and the fantasy land picture I found are both in blue tone and can easily merge harmonically.
I then worked on adding the dog to the background. The first trouble I encountered was to cut it out perfectly. The quick selection tools help me quickly select the main body of the corgi, but as it is furry, it is hard to deal with the edge. Moreover, since the original background is a grassland, the grey and light green color at the edge of the cropped out dog is very obvious, especially in its tail part. The dog also seems really abrupt in the background, as its yellow strongly contrast the blue background. I tried to adjust its size and rotate it, but it still seem strange in the picture.
I found a couple of filters but were unsure about their effects, so I want to the PhotoShop workshop. Cindy introduced photoshop’s new feature of Refine Edge Brush Tool, which can be access in the mask layer after selecting the object. Cindy demoed this tool to me with cutting out the shape of the flying hair from a picture of a girl. After refining the selection at the edge with this tool, I could did an overall adjustment of its smoothness and sharpness. However, this improvement on the cutting did little work to merging the dog into the background environment. Cindy suggested me to adjust the color tone of the dog, adding blue element to make it fit in better. She also showed me the tool of distorting and wrapping the image, telling me that shape and directions also matter. I tilted the dog image to face towards the hole, and adjusting its color. I also blurred its edge to merge with the blue lights in the background image. Besides, I explored the smudge tool and used it to create the visual effect of the dog being pulled towards the blackhole, where is now the fantasy land, by its mystery power. To further soften the edge, I select the part near the hole and adjust its color tone to be more blue, merging with the blue lights. Finally, I did some sharpening on some details and finish my creation.