Project4

This project called on some pretty meticulous selecting, but I managed to achieve the desired element without too much trouble. I think the most difficult aspect of the project was the fine work that had to be done with the many details of the strings and net. I started by photographing a toy boat I own with my macro lens. Because this left much around the target, I cropped the image, then began by selecting major areas I wanted to remove. I used the magic wand to do this. This didn't get all the desired areas selected, so I entered "QuickMask" (it's actually very slow) mode to manually paint away what I didn't want. This step took about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to complete. When I was done, I still had some residual background left around certain parts of the boat (i.e. the strings). to get rid of this, I "RefineEdge"ed the selection and contracted it to take out the bad spots. Then I shrunk the pretty large, 5340 x 4464 image down to half its size and prepared a new image. I made the new image 3 times larger than the halved boat image. then I copied the boat image into the middle of the new image, and kept copying from there. Each time I made a new copy, I would drag it to places it would snap (the edges of the new image and of each other). Then I just added various filters to each copy which were their own layers. I ended by adding a gradient filter, at full opacity, to the previously all white background. I only used photoshop CS4 and its plug-in CameraRaw for this project... well, those and my camera of course.