I signed up on the Kelby Training on-line training site. So far its been a good investment in time and money. It is also why I haven’t posted for a while – I’ve been spending a lot of time absorbing.
But to make absorbing effective, it needs to be followed by some doing. I’ve started trying out some of the techniques and ideas I’ve learned. I’m liking the results.
One of the first things I tried was a second wack at the tramp composite. The same day I shot the pictures of my daughter, I shot some of my son and his friend. While my 7 year old art critic rejected my effort, my son was more impressed. He asked if I would do one for him and being the good father that I am I obliged. It also gave me a chance to improve on my previous efforts.
Here’s the end result:
For the most part it was a repeat of the first try. My selections went a bit faster and cleaner. My shading went better. Overall it was a smoother effort. The primary difference was in the base image. On the first one I pulled up an image of the girls on the tramp and added other images around them. About halfway in I wanted to move them and couldn’t, because I hadn’t generated an image of just the tramp.
So on try #2 the first thing I did was generate an image of the tramp without participants. I found two images where the jumpers were not overlapping. I stripped the jumpers from the base image. Then I did a Photomerge of the two images to align them. Then I dropped a layer mask on the second image and simply erased the hole away. It worked very nicely. I had a clean picture of the tramp and I was able to position the jumpers more easily.