Basic photoshopping Exercise: They Cannot be Stopped!

This is the image done for David's photo manipulation class, in which we had to go through the basic tools while mucking around with the stock standard photos that ship with Windows 7. Seeing the penguin photo I immediately knew what I wanted to do and it was just a matter of going through the right steps with the right tools.

First thing I did was grab the background image, which was the desert image, and separated it into two sections using a mix of the magnetic lasso tool and the polygonal lasso tool to get the selection as close to the mountain range as possible. I then separated the two elements onto different layers and began work on adjusting the hue, saturation and colour balance until I found the right combination I was after.

Finally I added a gradient to the to the sky part of the image, that was a mix between deep red and a red with a drastically reduced opacity to give the horizon line a red tinge.

To add the penguins I selected one of the penguins, once again using a mix of lasso tools to get the best possible selection I could get, and then cut and copied the penguin across to the desert image The penguin was then duplicated again into a second row and then the edges were touched up with the blur tool to remove the hard edging that follows most cuts without feathering. These two penguins were then duplicated until the entire bottom row was covered with penguins.

For the final penguin I used the same selection method of the penguins to cut it out of the image and into the desert image where i used the free transform tool to re size him to an appropriate height, and then created another layer nestled between the cliff face and the sky. A paint brush and a healing brush was used to add a red tinge to the penguins yellow coat.

The texting tool was used to create the text (Shocking I know) and then was edited with the transform tools to create the upwards arc. Finally once all the elements were put in place the image was flattened and then saved out as a jpg file where it now hangs at the top of this post.

Hurray for basic photo shopping skills.