Montage ‘making a composite picture from pieces of others’
As with all other techniques there are various ways of producing montages in photoshop, you can use a ‘selection’, ‘quick masks’, ‘masks’, ‘mask channels’, ‘alpha channels’ ‘extraction filter’ etc etc. They all produce a similar outcome in that you import part of one photo onto another to improve the overall effect by making a composite image. Regardless of which technique you use there are a number of basic rules which must be remembered. Lighting – the two images must have a similar light source, i.e. the sun must be coming from the same side! Colour – the colour balance of the images must be similar, i.e. an image taken by flash at night will not look right montaged on a misty subdued day time photo. Scale – the two images must have a believable scale in comparison to one another. Montage 1 - using blending options! Example 1 Importing a sky:
The master image (1) has a very uninteresting bleached out white sky,
the base image (2) is an image of a more interesting sky.
You then must copy the base layer onto the master layer but ensure that the base is below the master in the layer stack, you may have to resized the base image to fit..
Note how the sky remains the same as the original master image. To be able to see the new imported sky you must adjust the blending tool in the layers palette from normal to darken.
Any slight bleeding of the new sky into the buildings etc. can be tidied up with the eraser tool, by simply erasing out the sky where it bleeds through.
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