photo composite

Assignment: Take 2 or more photos and composite them together to create one image.

The inspiration for my photo composite came from the idea that New York City is considered a "concrete jungle." Placing wild animals into the streets of the city is just a play on the idea. The animals actually seem more civil than the daily New York crowd. The most difficult part I had was proportioning the animals to make it appear somewhat accurate.

Techniques:

I used various adjustment layers for each of the animals to achieve accurate lighting to match the night setting of the city. The original photos of the animals were relatively bright so I adjusted their curves, brightness, and exposure. I also adjusted the hue of the zebra and rhino to make it look as if the surrounding lights were bouncing off of them. I used the hue of the paint lines of the crosswalk to guide me in deciding the hue of the zebra since they are both supposed to be white. I also added shadows to the animals. And I used the clone tool on the zebra to remove some orange dirt from its body. To finish the piece off I applied a warming filter to the entire image to make it all uniform as if the bright lights create a warm effect.

Original source images (from stock.xchng):