©Bert Gildart: Following my posting on November 1 about Photoshop techniques, several people wrote and said the sky back–dropping my eagle photo did not look real. They said skies usually have some gradations, and they’re right. Consequently, I decided to take the Photoshop techniques–explained in my earlier posting–one step further.

SKY PHOTO

To try and better my first attempts I photographed the sky from my own backyard and then used that sky (one with clouds and some gradations) to backdrop the Yellowstone National Park eagle. I used some of the same techniques described in my posting to create “layers,” except this time I did not use the “Fill” technique to alter the color in the background layer.

This time I used the “Move tool” and literally lifted the eagle from the original window and placed it into the window containing the sky and clouds taken in my backyard. In this new window, the sky became the background, the eagle the foreground–and that’s the way in which they were stacked using the applicable procedure in Photoshop.

Though I think I’m getting there, something still doesn’t look quite natural in my composite, so I might keep this as an ongoing project, sharing if I think I’ve made improvement. Essentially, I believe the separation between eagle and background too abrupt, despite my use of the “Blur Tool” along the edges.

Hopefully this posting will inform on the possibilities inherent in Photoshop, something I intend to keep chipping away at these next two months–before Janie and I strike out in early January for another extended trip. The trip will be into the Southwest, and we’re making it to complete assigned stories.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 10:50 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.