Some assembly required

 

These three diptychs were made from the source images found in The Proper Tool for the Job. This collection of images was taken over several month with both a DSLR and Android phone. They were different sizes, resolutions and most had a shallow depth of field; everything that makes them decent individual images but something that makes composites especially difficult. I used ten of the thirty images from last weeks post to make the three composites shown here.

 

Graffiti on the Street

The inspiration for this image was the bicycle shop. Fabber cyclery on First St. near downtown San Jose was someplace I passed on the way home from work many times. It has a large Schwinn sign panted on the side and I always thought it would be neat to get a picture with my car in front of it.

This assignment came up and I decided now is as good a time as any.

This was shot on First Street near downtown San Jose at Sunset. One of the first things to do was clean up the side of the car through the doors. For this I used the pen tool and drew in the contoured reflection based on what I remember it looking like.

Next the sign and wires were removed using the Content Aware fill.

Then the back wall was whitewashed to make the canvas.

The HyperSprite lettering was done in Impact font and then converted to a path and stylized using the anchor points and direct selection tool. They were then seprated out to their own layers so the drop shadow effect would work properly.

The Mini in the lower corner is the same image that resides on this site at the top of the classic mini section. I used threshold to reduce black and white. Created a selection based on that painted it in.

The Yosemite Valley and Cat were drawn by hand with the aid of images while the guitar and names on the left were freehand.

Lastly, I copy merged and pasted to a new layer, flipped it vertically and transformed it to fit the contour of the window. I then made a mask to exclude the rest and that’s about it.

 

Putting it all together

The assignment for last week was to put this assigned bird into a composition.  Something else shown in lesson videos for the week was the Photoshop Cloud filter.

The lighthouse was shot some time ago on vacation. Taking some clouds that were over San Jose last spring, I applied a perspective transformation and enhanced the color to give them more depth and to match the saturation of the lighthouse grass. I added  the bird to the foreground but it lacked blur the birds in the videos had so I made a copy on another layer and applied a motion blur and placed it directly below the clean bird layer.