Photo editing project draft

wild animal in city

My primary audience for this project is American college students. They are passionate about environmental issues that are threatening wild animals’ living space, and they are the future force of saving animals that are in danger of extinction. Human activity is one of the most devastating factors that drive wild animals to extinction, the expansion of industry as an example, not only polluting the environment but also destroying their habitat which forces them to move from their home to other places that are uncertain of food and predators. My purpose of this project is to convey the idea of protecting the living space of animals.

The way that I construct my photo is to perform a scenario where there are no more places for the wild animals to move, so eventually they have to come back to where they used to live but forced to leave back in the day , which already becomes the city of people. They are wandering around the crosswalk, trying to look for where their home used to be. . I have a cat on the crosswalk that is looking up helplessly (in my opinion). And a snake and turtle that walked past each other but no bothering each other even though their relationship should be prey and predator, because they both know that without a place to live, they would not survive anyway in such an environment.

To create this photo, what I did first is to find a photo of a crosswalk that is taken from a bird's eye view, then I use the object selection tool to remove the people and a car that was originally on the crosswalk. After removing them, I used the content aware-fill tool and the clone stamp tool to recover the blank spot which the person and car was at. By using these 2 tools, I am able to reconstruct the crosswalk stripe and make it into an empty street. Then I start to find images of animals that are taken from a bird’s eye view as well and cut them out. When selecting the animals, it is hard to select them as a whole with the selection tool, so I select the body parts of them separately and use the merge layer to merge them into one and then adjust the side and orientation. After this, I use the select and mask and refine edge tool to adjust the area surrounding their skin, because they are furry, it is really hard to make them look real with only the selection tool since they are cut out. And using the refine edge tool to brush around can apply a furry feature on the area surrounding them. Lastly I use the drop shadow to create shadow to make it more realistic since they are walking on a street under daylight

What I learned from this project is that there are many tools on photoshop that can remove an object from a photo and then refill that area with different tools so that it looks like there was nothing there from the beginning. As a beginner of photoshop I never knew that there are so many ways you can change a photo by simply applying a little feature on it, and all these tutorials help me a lot on using it and give me lots of insight. It is really interesting to work on photoshop and try different mechanisms to change a photo.

For the next project, I will continually trying different tools that the application is able to perform to figure out ways to achieve the desired product that I want to perform. What I would avoid is that using photo that contains too much details as starter because it is really a ton of work to get rid of the unwanted part and it is really time consuming, and the chance of making a mess is so huge. I figured it out that why don't I just start with an emptier photo as starting and then work on it after spending time trying to clean the part that I do not want.