Pp #21

[CJK]

MOD EDIT - My apologies to Chris. I closed the thread before he got the chance to write up this explanation how he did that magnificent bit of work to win the PP Challenge #21. To see Chris's entry +the others, click here.

Not sure if this is where it should go but the previous post has been closed so here I go, sorry for the delay, I was camping the last week in the great Colorado rocky mountains.

Thanks for all the votes, this competition was fun and actually quite difficult coming up with an idea for the photo provided.

When I saw the old Woodie I was blanked at first, but after looking at the license plate my idea hit me.

My steps were pretty simple, I don't have a ton of experience in PP and probably did it the long and hard way, but it was my the only way I knew how to layer several images.

1. Converted original image to black and white.
2. Converted a photo I took of the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor last month to BW
3. Layered both into one image.
4. Adjusted the exposures, curves, saturation, contrast and sharpness of each to get them close to the same.
5. Placed the original image on top, and used the eraser tool to bring the battleship into the frame.
6. Used the clone tool to remove a lot of the people and add more of the road where I needed it.
7. Clone tool with the sea, to bring it close to the road and car.
8. Ran into problems with cropping, so once I got it close I cloned the front part of the ship and added it to the space I was struggling with behind the car.
9. Used the eraser tool at several different opacity levels with the windows, so the ship actually could be seen in the windows but keeping some of the reflectiveness of the car's glass.
10. Zoomed in and erased the "6" and the "Ontario" on the plate and used the text tool to change to "1" and "Hawaii". I picked a text close to the plate text, then added drop shadow, inner glow, outer glow and italicized it.


The worst part and most time consuming were zooming in almost to the point of seeing the pixels and erasing and cloning, trying to get the seams of both images to blend naturally.

It was a fun project that took up a slow day at work and gave me time to sharpen my skills in the CS suite.

Great original image, although difficult to get the brain working to PP it, great entries all around. The best part of the PP contest is seeing how others tackle the project and different POV on the same image.

Thanks

Chris