Digital Manipulation - Masking and Selection

I had another go at masking and selection using the mask icon within the layers palette this time and 2 different images:

                                              shutter 1/80 aperture f.4 iso 100 FL 105mm

                                                                      Looking in
                                              shutter 1/320 aperture f7.1 iso 200 FL 24mm

I took  'Looking in' on one of my Calke park trips and the flower image on the way home from there in someone's garden.  I was drawn to Looking in because of the pattern formation in the shadows of the foreground.   It looks like shadows at the foot of the trees form a pair of spectacles so my idea was to put a flower in each part of the frame...to look at the view with rose tinted glasses.  I used this flower, rather than one of my actual rose images because I thought its full big shape was better to act as the eyes.

The following screen grabs give examples of my process:

I placed both images in photoshop and moved the flower image to one side to look at them both. I copied the background layer.  I planned to remove most of the green background from the flower image, once I had given it a rough cut out and in thinking this, I knew it would be more important when it was placed in the left spectacle frame (which was on the tree trunk) more than the right one, because the right part of the frame was on the floor where patches of green grass would let it mix in.

I set about cutting the flower out using the lasso tool and did edit, copy, to copy this selection.

Then I opened the scene image and did edit paste.

I clicked on the mask icon in the layers palette at this stage then did transform scale to resize the flower (by dragging in the top right corner of the box that appears) to make it smaller:

At this same time I also needed to remove the green from around my rough cut out of the flower. I selected the brush tool and set a size of 20px and opacity of 85% and ensured black was set as the foreground colour.  Then I brushed around the edge of the flower to remove the unwanted green.  As I did so I changed the brush to smaller to get into the intricate parts more.  If I went too far and cut out abit of the flower it was ok because I had plenty of flower to play with, but if I made a big mistake and took a big part of it out, I could hit x (to revert to white as the foreground colour) and brush back over it to bring it back, then hit x to continue.  I did not need to do this however because where I did take the odd tip off I simply rounded its edge to blend in.

I zoomed into the flower to make the brushing easier (by cmd +)

I used the move tool to place the flower in position in the left hand part of the spectacles and continued to resize down to fit easily within the frame.  I thought the flower would look better rotated round slightly so did edit, transform rotate to turn it.

Now it was looking more eye like, I needed to use the brush tool again to paint it into the other part of the frame using the same method outlined in my previous Digital Masking and Selection blog. (see Digital Masking and selection).

Once I had done this I could move both the eyes together to position them as I saw fit, between the frames.

This was ok and as I had thought the green around the flower that I had brushed into the second eye blended into the scene because of the grass, but the eyes didn't really stand out enough.  I saved the image as a psd and a jpg, so that I could then go back into the psd to carry out more amendments:

I returned and opened the 'psd' in order to make the eyes stand out more because I didn't want it to look like the flowers were just plonked on and part of  the whole scene...  They needed more defining to make them stand out so I increased the brightness slider to its maximum.  This only affected the eye areas, because of the mask, and not the rest of the image.

By un- ticking the preview box I was able to compare the before and after look to check... Yes the eyes did stand out more on full brightness.

The above shows the history box.

At this stage I had saved the image as a psd to return to it later.  When I opened it again I cropped in to cut out some of the left side that was not necessary or relevant to the scene, and to place the main subject, the glasses, using the rule of thirds.  I then enhanced the contrast, brightness and colours overall.

Rose tinted glasses

I concluded that the white that now appeared around the flower eyes was fine because the background of eyes are white anyway.  I think the lightening of the flowers make them appear more like roses and I am satisfied with the final result because it achieved what I set out to do...to create a look of rose spectacles looking into a nature scene, so I flattened the image (layer flatten image) and saved as a jpg.