PHOTO MONTAGE PHOTOSHOP FULL
PHOTO MONTAGE PHOTOSHOP TRIAL

Step 8: Angled Saw Blade Placement, Blade Slot & Shadow Once the composition feels good to me and I have a general idea of how everything will go together, I flatten the Practice Composition down to one layer and use it as a guide and positioning tool for all the subsequent final layers that I build above it. Adding this step Practice Composition stage gives me plenty of room to play without ending up with a damaged final piece. The reason for this? Since there is a lot of size adjusting and image distortion happening at the very beginning of building a composition, the pieces I’ve manipulated can begin to look “soft” or damaged and not retain their original crispness. It’s at this stage that I also make some basic color choices and other adjustments. Step 6: Making a Practice Composition for ReferenceĪfter collecting and cutting out and cleaning up all of my assets, I create a to-scale Practice Composition of the piece where I am able to freely experiment, size, and arrange all the elements I have into a composition that looks and feels right. The most work that needed to be done was to remove the type on the angled blade image (which I will explain later in the tutorial). Note 2: Some minor brightness and color adjustments were applied to the images after being opened in Photoshop but nothing extreme.

PHOTO MONTAGE PHOTOSHOP TRIAL

Simple trial and error are still my best friends! I wish I had a perfect eye - but I don’t. Note 1: It took about 5 to 7 separate shots of the angled saw blade and the chisel to get the exact angle I wanted for use in the illustration. The pictures that I took with the iPhone ended up being more than enough resolution to maintain image crispness at the size they would eventually be printed. I took the photos using my iPhone Xs with minimal to no special lighting setup. I found the Saw Blade and Chisel in my garage and cleaned them up prior to being photographed.

Saw blade (shot at two angles– one shot flat or used as a source for shadow).

Step 3: Content: Asset Curation & CreationĪfter deciding what images will appear in the illustration, I begin curating them.

125” (⅛”) around the entire image making my working file 9.25” x 11.125” (RGB 300dpi). The magazine’s final trimmed dimensions are 9” x 10.875” - so to allow for easy placement by the designer as well as trimming of the image in the printing process I add. Both give crucial insights into how the final image will be visually consumed by the reader.

The image was going to appear on the left.īoth page dimensions and positioning of the art are critical pieces of information as they affect composition building.

In this case (as the art was to be appearing in a magazine) I asked specifically if the piece would be positioned on the left or right side of the magazine spread. My first two priorities when beginning a project is to establish the overall dimensions of the final piece as well as understanding where the image will appear.

PHOTO MONTAGE PHOTOSHOP FULL

The piece we are making today is a new composition of an actual full page illustration for a magazine article that I worked on a few years back.

Photo montage photoshop