Photo Manipulation in Photoshop
The above image is my first attempt at making the church on the cliff using image manipulation in Photoshop but it wasn’t my first time using Photoshop even though my prior experience wasn’t that in depth and was quite a while ago. I started with an image of a cliff side with a port in the daytime. I used the clone stamp tool to cover up the port with the ocean and I replaced the sky with an image of the night sky. Also, I ‘smudged’ the line (using the smudge tool) between the two images to make the images look better together and I added a moon into the sky. The main part of the image is the church placed on the cliff edge. I took the church from another image and cut it out using the selection tools available in Photoshop. To add some semblance of realism to the image, I added a reflection of the sky in the ocean by copying part of the sky and the moon and flipping it vertically as well as turning the opacity down to around 10%. I also turned the brightness down on the parts that I used from the photo in the day using adjustments. The image turned out pretty well in my opinion although I could have improved multiple parts of the image such as the reflection and the ocean line. Considering I hadn’t used Photoshop for a while I feel like I managed to turn out the image quite quickly but if I had taken more time I could have fixed the issues I mentioned.
After finishing the first version of the image, I failed to realise that the ocean line varied in height even though there was no reason for it to do this in the image. This was because when I replaced the port that was at that part of the image, I didn’t bring the ocean line down when it should have been. I once again used the clone stamp tool to rectify this issue. To try and make the moon look more natural in the sky I used the blur tool but it didn’t make that much of a difference so I aren’t happy with it. With the change to the ocean line, I think the image looked better as it made it look more natural.
To try and make the reflection more realistic, I got an image of the moon being reflected in the ocean (pictured below) and attempted to isolate the reflection the best I could. I then placed it underneath the moon. I feel like it is an improvement over the previous reflection but I think it looks out of place so if I were to do more improvements I would try to make that and the moon look like they fit more naturally in the image.
I enjoyed using Photoshop to manipulate images but I feel like I would rather make 2D art using other methods as I feel like I would be able to produce better quality images using other methods.