Trials of creepiness

I had this idea to take this bride and groom photo that I shot while walking around Pittsburgh last weekend and add a Furry head to the groom. I looked in my files of Furries street shots to find just the right head at the right angle and came across this goat-like thing. That was the easy part. My Photoshop skills for something like this are severely lacking and I was put to the test. Using only Photoshop Elements (someday I’ll upgrade, after a computer upgrade) I did the best extraction I could of the head and tried to work it into the image. I can’t justify any masking specific software because I don’t do this thing often enough, so I work with what I got.

It turned out sort of the way I imagined but I quickly found out what I did wrong. The head shot was taken in bright sunlight so I should have toned it down a little before  extracting it. Also, the head shot was taken at a low ISO and the b&g shot was taken at a higher ISO with a different camera. I needed to make the noise match a little better which would have helped blending the pieces together. And finally, pixel level editing is tedious and I quickly lost patience.

My final process of the photo was a nice clear black and white but it was easy to tell the head was hacked into the scene -too bright, edges too defined. I was going to give up there but thought about saving it since I did a lot of work to even get to that point. I added some texture and grain to the image which helped mask the hard edges somewhat and kind of hid my newb attempt, but I can’t say I like the tonality of this image better.

This is only a trial run. Looks like it’s back to the digital drawing board to try again.

© David Guidas