Editing Rudyard

Looking through all the photographs from my photo shoot made it very clear to me that I wanted to do some editing for my final outcome, in the original painting there is no gap between the wall and the door and the book shelves at The Mirimar were much too high! The perspective seemed to be warped a little so I settled on using the shots which were taken on the tripod to ensure the same distance and angle from the camera with one photograph just of the back ground and one with my model in place. This made editing much easier.  

My photographer, Charlotte Dart, explained how it would be easier to manipulate the images if they are underexposed rather than over exposed and the colour cannot be brought back but can be lessened. 

Background Original Photograph at The Mirimar, taken by Charlotte Dart

Original Photograph with Model in place at The Mirimar, Taken by Charlotte Dart

The first thing I tackled when editing this and working on the background only photograph was to move across the door, selecting parts of the door that I wanted and moving them across with the arrow keys. 

I did the same with the shelves to move them down, one shelf at a time, I then stretched the books so that they looked more correct for their new shelf size and mimicking the size  of the books in the painting. 

Whilst planning my props I hadn't properly considered the size of the shelves, I should have really measured them to make sure that my painting and cork board would fit into them, but I didn't so this was another problem to solve. I had flipped my cork board so it would fit into the shelf but this meant that the notes were in the wrong place so I selected them rotated and placed them in a more appropriate place and whilst they were on another layer they were trimmed to a better shape. I had asked Charlotte to take a separate picture of my boat painting in the background so that I could edit it in which was also fairly simple.

At this point I used an overlay of Burne Jones' Painting so that I could scale everything correctly. By lowering the opacity on this scale it made it easier to place everything.

Editing by placing the Painting over the photo with a low opacity 

Background all ready for Ryan to be placed in

I then placed ryan into the paiting by selecting the parts of him that I wanted and placing him accordingly to the overlay. I spent quite a while using puppet warp to make his face fit a little better with Rudyard Kipling's profile, and altered his tie and where the lapel fell moving it closer to his collar. I attempted to move his pocket up to the same place as Kipling's but this distorted the fabric thus better to leave it where it was!

I went around the outline of the new layer with the eraser tool to make it fuzzier so it would blend better with the back ground. I then applied various effects and this is the out come!