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Lecture 108 Practice:

Introduction:

You will find you often need to assemble elements in an architectural collage/scene. Today we will practice assembling disparate pieces and make lighting conditions “believable” in your final scene.

Part I: Selecting a scene.

• Please select a scene for your collage. The scene can be a natural landscape or an urban scene but should be vacant of primary elements (no/few people).
• Examine the scene. Where is the horizon line? Where are the vanishing points? What type of perspective is the view? (i.e. 1-point or 2-point) What added elements would enhance the composition? How can you make the scene dynamic? Where is the light coming from in the scene?

Part II: Select images to integrate

• Look through your isolated people from last week. Could any of them be added to this new scene? (Pay attention to lighting direction noted in step 2 above)
• If you can’t find appropriate people, look on the course website under Resources>Collage Images. If you still cannot find what you are looking for, look online or create your own.
• Using the techniques discussed & demonstrated in lecture, integrate your person into the scene.
  • Place Colored image into the scene using File>Place. Right click on the layer and select “Rasterize Layer.” Transform the image so that the eye line of the people is at the horizon line.
  • Place the gray image into the scene using the same method above. Scale the image to match the colored image.
  • Use Edit>Transform>Skew to manipulate the shadow so that it matches the shadows in the scene. Be patient as this takes time.
  • Change the shadow layer to have a Multiply blending mode.  [Review Lecture 105 - Blending Modes]
  • If the color is wrong for the shadow, use a Hue and Saturation Adjustment layer (Press Ctrl+Alt+g to apply just to the shadow layer). You will likely need to change the saturation to about 90% and then adjust the Hue to shift the color as necessary.
  • With the shadow layer selected, navigate to Filter>Blur and select Gaussian Blur. Set the radius to be 1.0 pixels (or whatever looks right in the scene).
• Repeat and add more elements until your image is well composed and dynamic.

Part III: Repeat

• Select another scene (the opposite of what you chose in step 1) and repeat part 2 to integrate elements into your new scene. The more you practice these techniques now, the easier they will become later.

Part IV: Posting your work.

• Make a new post for Exercise 108 and include the two images you created above. Place your best image as the featured image.
• You should comment on this exercise.

Links: (Sample Scenes, Creative Commons License)

• City Streets
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/victorhm/13046570843/
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/124570033@N06/15992676116/
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyg/5067985165/
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/youngshanahan/9721689551/
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/joceykinghorn/13753746864/
• Landscapes
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/janitors/15794024965/
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/quekevelyn/9397419082/
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/sota-k/3965214311/
  • https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewescott/8954078857/