How To Create a Photo Montage
Page Three

(Frog and Chair photo montage by D.K. Pritchett. Tutorial continued). Once the frog image was complete and the background was masked out, it was time to add the chair and background. The chair is an antique ladder-back toy doll's chair. I took it into the woods and photographed it using the Kodak Easyshare® digital camera. I also photographed a wonderful fern and tree root that formed a natural froghouse. I took several shots so that I would have a choice of views and backgrounds.

Although I photographed the chair in front of the ferns and tree root that are visible in the montage, the composition was not satisfactory without some additional manipulation. I chose the best view of the natural "froghouse" to be my background. I use MS Paint® to isolate the chair from its background and work on each element of the subject separately, to be merged for the final composition. I used the same techniques as given in the first lesson to mask out the background of the chair. The end result of the masking was that the image of the toy chair now had a completely white background. I used "copy and paste" to try the chair over the background. I found that the background was too "busy" and needed adjustments. Also, the chair was too bright looking for the background.

For the next task, I used Kodak Easyshare® photo-editing software to crop and adjust the coloring of the fern and tree root. I wanted the fern, sky, trees, and tree root to remain bright, but I wanted the pine needles and the hole in the root to be dark. I carefully masked these areas so that I had the left half of the picture (cropped at a rough diagonal on the bottom, removing the pine needles and the hole in the root). Next, used Kodak Easyshare® to darken both the chair and the background. Once this was accomplished, I dragged and dropped the left half of the background over the darkened ground (making sure to choose "transparent" from the Paint® toolbar).

Now, I had three images: the frog, the chair, and the background with the "froghouse" root. I used drag and drop to place the chair in front of the froghouse and to place the frog in the chair. The frog's front foot was stretched out and he appeared to be slightly floating from the chair. I found a piece of wood on the ground in one photo, so I masked out the background and flipped it into a vertical position to make a cane for the frog. This served to "push" him back into the chair.

Frog Lesson: Final Touches Thanks to Philip
Frog Lesson: Back to Page Three
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