Project 14: Adding an Object

The aim of this project was to paste the object from Project 13 on to a new background. The course materials suggested using something fairly plain, such as a sky or a plain surface. However, I had another image in mind – last week, whilst visiting the seaside village of Lynmouth, I took a picture of a bucket of shells for sale in a gift shop. The frame was filled from corner to corner with shells, and I thought that my ammonite fossil, once resized, might fit in quite nicely with these. Crucially, the shell photograph was taken using the flash and with the camera pointed directly downwards, as was the ammonite photograph. I was therefore hoping that it would be fairly easy to match up the lighting conditions on each image.

Here is the unprocessed shell image, and my isolated ammonite from the last project:

I firstly selected the ammonite, pasted it on to the shell image as Layer 1 and resized it to more closely match the shells:

As can be seen, the fossil looks out of place. It appears to have a light ‘halo’ around the edge (it was originally photographed on white paper, therefore this is probably due to reflection). Also, it appears to be ‘hovering’ above the other shells, and does not seem connected to them at all. Here are the steps I took next:

1. I repositioned the fossil. Placing it in a dip in the shells, and off centre, made an immediate difference in terms of how natural it looked.

2. Using the Levels and Curves commands, I altered the lighting/contrast of the background image so that it more closely matched the fossil. I applied a light Unsharp Mask to the shells, so that it matched the level of sharpness of the fossil image.

3. I temporarily made Layer 1 semi-transparent, and carefully erased parts of it, using the edges of shells underneath as a guide. This gave the impression of the fossil being partially buried under the other shells, rather than just sitting on the top.

4. I selected the area around the fossil by clicking in the empty area of Layer 1 with the Magic Wand tool. I then clicked on the Background layer in the Layers palette, and using the ‘burn’ tool, I added a shadow underneath the fossil. I tried to match it up with the other shadows in terms of strength, colour and direction.

5. Finally, I flattened the image and worked around the edges of the fossil with a soft-edged ‘clone’ tool, to eliminate the very light edges and make it blend more naturally into the background image.

Here is the result:

To my eyes, it is immediately obvious that the ammonite has been pasted in. However, that may be because I am aware that this is the case. I needed a second opinion! Without telling him it was a composite, I showed it to my husband and asked if anything looked out of place. He commented that the orange shell looked ‘too orange’, which is a fair point! The shells were bright and attractive, as they were there to be sold to tourists. Although I didn’t use the saturation slider, the colours would have been boosted further when I worked with the Levels and Curves.

Crucially, though, hubby didn’t detect that the fossil had been taken from another image, so I’ll count this one as a success!

If I were planning on using this image for any other purpose (e.g. to make into a print for the wall), I would also clone shells either from this image or another similar image on to the upper and lower left-hand corners, in order to hide the basket, which has crept into the frame. Alternatively, this side of the image could be cropped out.