Week 5 Project 

Kathryn Fletcher

Part 1: Masks

Found images to work with

In an ideal world, I would have scanned some of my photographs and combined them in an interesting fashion using masks and layers. However, since I am a snowstorm away from my office scanner, I decided to look on my computer to see what images were already sitting around for me to work with.

In the C:\Program Files\Plus! folder on my laptop, I found two wallpaper images:

• Dangerous Creatures wallpaper.jpg (here, cropped and reduced to 25% of original image size):
  
  
• Mystery wallpaper.jpg (here, reduced to 35% of original image size):
  

Since I was going to combine the images and I needed them to be small enough to display on a web page, I reduced their sizes as listed above. I needed to get the size of the mountain lion to be appropriate for the mystery library room image; after discovering a 35% reduction left the lion too large, I tried 25% instead and decided that would be close enough.

Created layers to work with

1. I started with the dangerous mountain lion image and used selection tools to select the lion away from its background.
2. I copied the selected mountain lion and pasted it as a new layer on top of the room image. I tucked him into the lower right corner, so he would appear near the table, facing the light of the candle.
   
3. I needed a copy of the table to appear on top of the lion so it would seem as if he were seated properly. I clicked on the background layer and selected Layers > Duplicate to make a copy of the background layer.
4. I then dragged this copy of the background layer to be at the top of the list and renamed it to table.

Created a mask to obscure room from table layer

1. I clicked on the table layer to make it active.
2. I chose to make the lion and background layers invisible.
3. I then used selection tools to select the table and the candlestick.
4. Next step: Selections > Invert command to select the area that was not the table/candlestick.
5. I created a mask from this selection: Masks > New > Hide Selection
6. I then edited the mask to refine the selection. In my original selection, I had included the candle and its glow but quickly realized it would obscure the lion's face. Editing the mask allowed me to delete the candle down to the table edge.
   
7. Last, I edited the right edge of the table, repainting some of the dark pixels with a lighter shade of brown.

I could have selected the table from the background and copied it as a new layer - but using a mask allowed me to easily refine and change my selection and to get the placement exactly where it was on the background layer.

Final Steps

When I made all layers visible, I realized the chair didn't look right since the lion appeared to be sitting on the floor.

I tried to create a mask that would obscure the chair but after creating it, I realized that there was no information available to display in its stead, even if I had been successful.

So I switched to editing the background layer. I used the dropper tool to select a pixel near the arm of the chair and then used the paintbrush tool to paint out the arm, working one row of pixels at a time. I then selected a small area of the paneling on the wall behind the chair and pasted it as a new selection a few times to obscure the back of the chair. The lion's body obscured the rest of the chair.

I clicked on the lion layer and applied the following effects:

• Edge > Noise > Despeckle
• Color > Adjust > Brightness/Contrast - decreased brightness to -30

Voilá!

final combined image

Go to Project Part 2: Color Correction

Kathryn Fletcher, kfletche.geo@yahoo.com

Return to Kathryn's Paint Shop Pro eClass page