Kimi, (Ask what time it is and I tell you how to make the watch; yes I am verbose)
Thanks for the comment. That pic was my first entry in any of Grant’s Challenges. Prior to that I had erroneously assumed that the challenges forum was for more advanced PSE’ers and hadn’t even looked there. Live and Learn. It was also about that time that I started contributing to your Creative Homework threads.
This particular image helped me solidify a few things. First Grant’s Challenge was to do something with the Magic Bus. Patti and I had just taken a trip around Mt Hood and took a few pics. We also had recently been to the Oregon Coast near Florence and had some current pics. My concept , as you can see, was to have the bus “transitioning” from the beach to the mountains.
First thing was to get the bus the way I wanted it. I got as fine tuned a selection (using magnetic selection tool and selection brush tool) on it from the original photo and made a new file with just the bus, invisible background. I copied (cntl-J) bus a couple of times. The chickens in the cab were from a previous challenge, but I wanted to use them too. Again as fine a selection as I could get of the chickens, copied and pasted into the bus pic. I inserted the chickens between a couple of the layers and erased selectively on the top layer to get them to show. It was a little tricky, but perseverance paid off. I know you’ve done this type of stuff.
Next I created a new document and put two pic’s on it, positioned and sized as you see them. One was the road near Mt Hood, the other the coast shot.
Then I pasted in the new bus image, then several (cntl-J’s). Then a layer where I made the frame and stuck it between bus layers and did selective erasing on the appropriate bus layers til I got the presentation I wanted.
The ribbon sort of image is from a tut in the on-line Creative Techniques course by Corey Barker. It involves use of the last of the default gradients (I’ve got PSE4), the one that looks like it has stripes in the foreground on it.
Then the outer frame. Straight forward.
The trickest and funnest parts were getting the selections and right layer orders, along with the selective fine tuned erasing.
I was pleased with the results.
