Liberty Glows

Spent the entire night playing in Photoshop to create some photos for the revision of my book The Joy of Digital Photography. I knew from the start of the book that Lady Liberty would be a part of it. Last fall Lynne and I spent three days in New Jersey shooting the statue and visiting the area. I have never been more moved by a single photographic subject in my life. Something about seeing that face in person (it was my first time on Liberty Island, though of course I'd see her from Manhattan hundreds of times) really shook me to my core. The idea that she was the first vision of America that millions of immigrants (including my grandfather) saw hit me profoundly when the ferry first brought us close to her. I had an extraordinary first day there--it was baking hot and then we were hit by a rollicking thunderstorm. And as much as I tried to concentrate on photographing her, I could not shake this feeling that I was meant to step on that island, meant to look her in the face and meant to be there with a camera. When you go there, you are surrounded by thousands of people, most of whom, I think, are having the exact same experience: awe that such an amazing country exists and that such a fabulous work of art welcomes everyone. If you have never been there, go this summer. Take your kids, or take your parents--or both. You will never be the same.

By the way, I created this using a combination of color tools (including the channel mixer) and created the lighting effect using the--what else?--the lighting effects filter. Just playing and having fun. Also, today's Black Star Rising blog features two of my Liberty collages. Black Star is the greatest photojournalism agency in history and they have a really great and interesting blog.

Keep Working the Montage: Another Liberty

 

After writing about montage work yesterday, I kept working with a few different images of the Statue of Liberty. I find that the more I concentrate on just a small group of images the more ideas that pop up--it limits your picture choices and forces you to find new ideas with a limited palette. This is a montage of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline (both shot the same weekend) and it's totally just an experiment to try a few things. Essentially I used the method described yesterday--dragging one image (the skyline) onto the background image (the statue). I then made hue/saturation and selective color adjustments (to the overall montage and to each image) and then played with the blending modes until I found one that I liked (I ended up using linear light). But at this point the statue wasn't coming through strong enough, so I duped the background layer (Command J on a Mac) and again played with blending modes until Liberty's face come through more powerfully. Just by coincidence it was the same blending mode--linear light. 

I don't know if this is a finished product or not (I kept one version with the layers open so I could go back and play more--a good idea if you're not positive you're done) but it has a kind of poster/graphic quality that I like. The skyline background is pretty abstract and you might not really know what it is, but I still think it has a bit of an urban/modern look. The fun thing about doing this is that you learn more about the tools you're working with and you create some fun colorful images along the way. And there's no right or wrong, so it's all just fun. We had a great weekend photographing the Statue of Liberty and exploring and I'm having a lot of fun going back and pulling more out of the images. In fact, I shot nearly 1,000 photos in three days, I think, so I'll be playing with them for a long time!

Super Quick Trick for Making a Montage

 

One of the first things almost everyone does when they start to play with Photoshop is to make a montage from two or more images. It's easy and it's really fun to see what kinds of images work well together and which don't. Back in the film days we used to make montages like this using a slide duplicator to copy multiple images onto one frame of film and it worked pretty well (even color masters like Pete Turner were creating images this way) but, of course, you don't have a millionth of the control that you have in Photoshop. In Photoshop (or any other editing program really) you can combine as many images as you like and adjust the brightness and colors of each frame individually before you combine them.

One really fast way for combing images is to just open two different images and then use the move tool to drag one image onto the other. If you just click on the move tool and then click on one of the two (or more) images, you can simply drag it on top of the other and Photoshop will automatically open a new layer with the second image (whichever image is the bottom image becomes the background image in your new montage). You can then adjust the opacity (using the opacity slider in the upper right-hand corner of the layers palette) of the second image to alter how it interacts tonally with the image below it (which, again, is the background layer if you're only using two images). 

Once you have the basic opacity set (and you can always readjust it later), you can then tweak the colors, saturation, density, etc. of the montage. To create this image of the Statue of Liberty, for example, I first opened two images: one of the Statue and one of a sunset (both shot on the same day, coincidentally, which makes me like the image even more). I then did a quick curves adjustment on each one and then dragged the sunset onto the Statue shot (again, making the Statue the background image--but I could have dragged the Statue onto the sunset and made the sunset the background layer instead). Once they were combined I used the hue/saturation tool to pump the color a small amount and then used the selective color tool to darken the statue (by selecting the black channel and then adding more black to it--that just darkened the statue's silhouette a bit).

By the way, be sure that all of the images that you are combining are the same resolution and roughly the same size or you'll run into all sorts of sizing issues. And always work at high res (300 dpi) because it would be a shame to create a great image this way and then not be able to make a large print because you created your montage in a low-res version. I've done it a hundred times!

As I've said before in talking about editing, it's tougher to write out the instructions than it is to actually do it--there is a lot of playing and experimenting involved and if you were sitting right here, I could have you doing this in five minutes. The key thing is to pick one dominant image (like the Statue) that is almost a silhouette and then one more airy image to add color and sparkle. Also, once you have the two images combined, try playing with the layer blending modes and see if any of them creates an effect that you like. Layer blending modes are found in a drop-down menu at the top of the layers palette and they are just different ways for the layers to combine--experimenting is the only way to figure out what they do. 

Montages like this are a lot of fun to create and, as my high school art teacher told me a thousand times, there are no mistakes in art, it's all just playing until you like it!