How To Create a Photo Montage
Page 2

(Photo montage by D.K. Pritchett ~ tutorial continued). I photographed the frog several years ago using a traditional camera with a large macro lens and photo-emulsion film and added digital-photography elements to create the montage using basic imaging software. I had two photos of the frog. One had a better view of the subject, but was underexposed and had little contrast. I scanned both photos using a flatbed scanner. I used the view that had the best composition, but then used "cut and paste" to superimpose patches of the frog's skin from the other photo to improve the coloring.

My first task was to mask out the background, including a man's hand that obscured part of the frog's belly. I did this by using the circle and straight line tools of MS Paint®. I did this using a deep purple mask color, so that I could easily distinguish the mask from the subject. The frog's belly was covered by a man's hand, so I had to mask out the hand. After the masking was done, I used the color fill tool to change the mask to white, so that all of the background was removed.

After isolating the image of the frog, I was left with a frog which had a large blank area for the belly. I used "copy/paste" to isolate a pie-shaped section of the existing belly. I used the "image flip" utility to copy the section into various views and merged the sections to form a complete belly. I used the pencil tool to adjust any patch marks one pixel at a time. The frog's coloring seemed a little gray, so I used Koday Easyshare® to adjust the coloring.

Frog Lesson: Chair and Background
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