Don’t beat the seals

Last month I took a month off from work to go to Hawaii.

Awesome.

Let me say that again.

Awesome.

But I digress. If you’re a good little tourist, one of the places you’re likely to end up at in Hawaii is Sea Life Park. There’s something about these kinds of parks that hypnotize me into bringing my camera, even though I know in the back of my mind that I’ll come away with nothing but snapshots of people in a row, and blurry fish through thick glass.

Sometimes though I get lucky. Check this photo out:

Alright. I’m not that lucky. This image is actually a composite with elements from four different images. I’m not sure if seals stand up like this in nature, but they certainly do when a trainer feeds them fish:

I don’t suppose it’s too bad of a photo as-is, but I usually can’t leave well enough alone. No, leaving it alone would be boring.

On the last day in Hawaii, I hiked the Diamond Head crater. At the top I took a photo of the Pacific ocean below a sea of clouds. I placed this under the seals. There’s any number of ways to do this. I chose to use the pen tool, as outlined in a tutorial here.

As you can see above, the transition between the water below the seals to the ocean is a bit rough. Alright, it’s really rough. I needed a transition between the two different water textures. What made sense here was a cliff. Luckily, I had this shot from the southeastern coast of O’ahu:

A little work with the magic wand tool gave me the cliff I was looking for:

Blending just below the rocks (especially on the right side) got me:

You might also notice that I added a bit of sand texture. It came from one of the many beach photos I took. A color balance layer with mask helps the close-up water blend with the ocean, integrating the image together further:

I then removed the yellow reflection of the wall from the seals’ necks, and performed some global color balancing:

I dodged and burned to push the contrast, and then made it pop. For example, look under the top layer of clouds. You should notice that the sky is darker there:

The final step was to bind the whole image together to yield the image at the beginning of this post. An effective way to do this is to give the entire image a tint. In this case, I used Photoshop’s Photo Filter function under Adjustments in the Image menu to apply a blue tint. Take note that this technique works best if the individual elements are already well blended. Otherwise, no amount of tinting will bring it together.

When I snapped the original seal photo, it didn’t particularly speak to me. But I knew even before the shutter opened that I was taking the photo as raw material. Just because you can’t take a photo doesn’t mean you can’t make it.

Feb 10, 2008 by mike Trackback
Tags: compositing, Photography Process, photoshop, seals
Filed in: Photography Process
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