Anatomy of a Composite

One of the creative obstacles I constantly encounter is that my mind is much better skilled at making images than I am.  It's kind of like how I'm a much better piano player in my head than in real life.  Never having taken any lessons doesn't help much either.  But when it comes to photography, I kinda have some chops.   When it comes to digital artistry, I'm kind of a hack.

What is fortunate though, and I understand this, is that my mind makes pictures in the first place.  The one shown up left is an example of something my brain thought up all on its own.  Now I'll leave the whole philosophical debate over making vs taking pictures to the lint-pickers and naval-gazers.  I'll just say that I consider my job is to make the pictures that my brain makes into a reality.  I can't recall what it was that inspired this one.  My brain works in mysterious ways.  But what I can tell you is how I went about making it.

First I needed to figure out where to get the pieces.  I had in my capacity to create almost all of the elements myself.  There are four pieces to the image: sky, foreground, football player and rhino. The ground and sky were found locally at the dog walk area at Marymoor Park in Redmond, WA.  The football player I shot in my studio.  And the rhino was obtained from a stock image site.   
So now the individual pieces:

Sky:

Foreground:

Football Player:

Rhino:

When I built the image in Photoshop, I wanted to keep all the components as independent of each other as possible.  To make this happen, I put the elements into three groups: Background, Football Player, and Rhino.  Doing this lets me work on each of the parts independently and maximizes flexibility as I can make changes down the line without interfering with the other components.

I started by masking the foreground so I could easily drop the sky in.  I altered sky using the transform tools to match the foreground perspective.  Then I used adjustment layers to get the tonality that I wanted.  This was important to do first since the tonality of the "environment" would dictate the tonality of the other components.  

The next step was to mask the football player and rhino.  I shot the football player against the green screen to help with this process.  I still don't have my green screen lighting down yet.  But the lighting I used was sufficient enough so that I was able to use the selective color tool to do most of the heavy lifting in the mask making.  The mask for the rhino was a bit more difficult.  I used a color channel as the basis for the mask and then a combination of the magnetic lasso and pen tools to fine tune the edges.

Once all the pieces were ready, I placed them against the background.  Since I knew the image I was making, I chose all the perspectives to match as closely as possible before hand.  Luckily I was working with a single-point perspective and this really made things fairly easy as far as perspective matching goes.  The only placement task left was to size down the football player and transform the rhino.  I had to slightly transform the rhino to give a convincing feel that the two were actually head to head on the field.  At this point I also matched the color and tonality of each piece to the background.  I'm still working with individual groups and unflattened layers here, too.

The next part, and most difficult and probably the weakest element, was to create realistic looking ground contact so the two pieces didn't look like they were floating over the background.  I'm not so good at the ground shadows but I got as close as I could. One of the reasons I chose non-directional lighting was to avoid complicated ground shadows and contact points.  Hopefully with more practice (and either a drawing class) I'll get better.  Or at least get to the point where I can afford a good retoucher.  

The last part was overall tonality matching, component sharpening and unsharpening, and final touches on the ground contact points.  At this point I'm working with a flattened layer since I use a universal approach to final touches.  But before flattening (to a new layer -- I never destroy the underlying parts), I sharpened the rhino a bit and unsharpened the football player a bit to help match the resolutions at which each image was shot.  After I thought I was done, I walked away and watched some TV for awhile before returning to the image to make any final adjustments I may have missed.

I think the image as present, although not perfect, is pretty good.  At some point one needs to move along.  But the key thing here (for me at least) was to get this image out of my head and onto electronic paper.  That's where the true value of the work lies.  That and now I have something pretty cool that I made.