Photoshop - Combination For Main Image

Now I have looked at the three elements which made up my final front inlay image I wanted to blog about how I put these together and arranged them as well as giving an overview on the tools used and the file format I saved in.

I decided to create each element of this image in different workspaces. This was for my own personal ease as I found having too many layers in one workspace got too much and then I found myself getting confused and frustrated. Deciding what to separate into different workspaces was easy as it already seemed to fall into three different categories. The background, The Eiffel Tower and then the female actors.

To combine all of these images I used the background as a basis. This workspace hence had all of the layers which related to the creation of my background. Prior to this stage I saved my two other elements (The Eiffel Tower and the Actors) as bitmap file types. I saved both of these files as PNG's. This was due to the fact that they both needed the transparent background. This is something which PNG files offer really well. Going back to my background workspace I then used the File and Place Embedded option to add both of my images to the workspace. These were then non editable elements apart from their location and size.

Now I had all of these elements combined into one workspace I started playing around with the layout. I had previously looked at having the Eiffel Tower in the middle of the image with two girls either side however in practise this didn't work as intended. I then opted for a hierarchy effect having Sarah Jessica Parker at the front with all the other three characters trailing behind however this looked odd as I always had one side heavier than the other. For this reason I decided to strip my actors down to just three main actors. This meant that I did lose Cynthia Nixon. My image now looked much more even and worked so much better. I then positioned the Eiffel Tower to the left of the image.

The image below shows the combination of these three images. It is now clear how these all linked together to contribute towards a final product.

The below list is an overview of the tools I used in this section of my inlay:

Layers

Layer Masks

Hue/Saturation

Filter - Gaussian Blur

Layer Transparency

Magnetic Lasso Tool

Quick Selection Tool

Marquee Tool

Eraser

Brush Tool

Brightness/Contrast

Refine Edge

Layer Transparencies

Levels

Curves

Exposure

Gradient

 

As you can see I used a considerable amount of tools for this main image and this really related to the length of time this aspect took. I will however make a proper evaluation of this process in a later blog post. My final image was saved as a JPG file.