Making a memory - the art of illusion.

1.  Two Jack Lake  2.  Charles in kayak  3.  The illusion of Charles at Two Jack Lake.

The fact is that we were both at Two Jack Lake in Banff, but my friend, Charles, wanted a picture of himself in frame-1 as opposed to the image I had of him in frame-2.  And so, I was given the challenge of making it work.  In order to do this a number of steps were required (below).  The result was frame-3; it was made into an 11x14 inch print which he now has hanging on a wall at his house.

  1. take the raw image of frame-1 and create an 11x14 @300dpi file of it in Photoshop.
  2. take the raw image of frame-2 and select the image of Charles in his kayak.  I used the polygon lasso tool to do this with 0 feathering.  Copy it
  3. paste the copied image from frame-2 into frame-1.  Flip the image horizontally using the Edit/Transform menu command and rotate it a few degrees clockwise using the Free-rotate function.  
  4. use the eraser tool with a soft edge to remove any part Charles and the kayak that did not belong.  This trims the image down so that none of the scene from frame-2 distracts in its new home.  This is a labour-intensive process.  I prefer to do it on the full sized image before reducing it as it preserves details better.
  5. reduce the size of the pasted image using the Resize function; I shrunk it to about 70% of the original size.  
  6. drag the pasted image into the correct position.
  7. copy the layer, paste it, turn it upside down (flip vertically) and set the layer opacity to around 20%.  Move it so it joins with the bottom of his boat.  This gives the illusion of a reflection in the water.
  8. another round of erasing.  Erase the reflection from the rocks.  Erase the reflection and the kayak from where the small conifers are in front of the boat so that they appear (when pasting an object on a background it exists on top of it and so covered the evergreens.  Those parts of the reflection and boat had to be deleted so that the underlying vegetation would appear to be in front.)
  9. flatten the image
  10. use the clone tool to fix any areas of step 8 that were not satisfactory.
  11. save, print, and resize and save again.
My friend, Charles, was happy with the final product.  I sent him a resized copy to make sure he approved the job before printing it.  I visited him recently at his home in Innisfail and gave him the photo there.  He was overjoyed with the result.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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