Animals in the 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 pollutes the environment but also destroys their habitat which forces them to move from their home to other places that are uncertain of food and predators. The 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 are 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 walked past each other but did not bother 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 where the person and car were at. By using these 2 tools, I can reconstruct the crosswalk stripe and make it into an empty street. But later, I look at my final product, the crosswalk no longer looks like a crosswalk once the animals stand on it, instead, it just look like a random stripe, so I change the background to a picture of the city. 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 their body parts of them separately and use the merged layer to merge them into one and then adjust the size 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 to the area surrounding them. Lastly, I use the drop shadow to create a shadow to make it more realistic since they are walking on a street in daylight
What I learned from this project is that there are many tools in 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 to it, and all these tutorials helped me a lot in using it and give me lots of insight. It is really interesting to work on photoshop and try different mechanisms to change a photo.