A little bit of magic

When I thought of this theme I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to start to learn how to use Photoshop and manipulate some photos, hopefully making them in some way magical. I've never used Photoshop and found playing with it over the last fortnight very challenging but I also learnt a lot.

Reflections (1st January 2013)
I had to take quite a few photos to end up with this. First, I set up my camera as close to the mirror as I could to get as much of the mirror in the frame as possible. Then I stood as close as I could to the mirror, without getting too much of my back in the frame, and took the pic. I then took a second photo of the mirror with no reflection other than the room.

After this I rotated the camera and took about fifteen photos all surrounding the mirror. I then used Microsoft Ice to stitch these together, including the "blank" mirror shot in the center. It was then time to go to Photoshop and try to merge the expanded image and the reflection image together. I also altered the opacity of the reflected image to make it look a little ghostly.

Fly away Peter (5th January 2013)

I'm not really happy with this image - I think it would have looked better if my person was not so upright in his posture. But still, it was fun to take.

For this photo I firstly took a photo of my subject standing up a ladder in a paddock. We then removed the ladder and took the same photo of just the landscape to use as the background image. In Photoshop I merged the two photos together and removed the ladder. Half of his left foot, the one standing on a rung of the ladder, was missing and I've no idea how to correct that in Photoshop so I simply copied his right foot and pasted it over the missing left one. This is something I'll have to learn how to do properly in future lol!

Teacup (6th January 2013)

This image took soooo long to edit lol! I'm sure there must be a quicker way.

Firstly I took a photo of a teacup sitting on the arm of a bench seat. I then took several photos of myself in a position that I thought would reflect how I might sit if I was small enough to fit into the cup. When I got a photo that looked ok, I opened up Photoshop and cut myself out and then pasted that image over the teacup. That didn't work as my legs didn't look like they were going to come up over the lip of the cup as the angle wasn't great enough - instead they stuck out through the side of the cup. So I deleted the image, went back to the original, and cut out instead just my torso and arm. I shrank the image down and placed it inside the cup. I then cut out just my legs and pasted them over the cup, rotating the angle till it kind of looked ok. It was then a matter of slowly deleting out all the stuff I didn't want in the image until it hopefully looked like I was sitting in the cup.