Gorilla's in the Mist

[dankearl]

Gorilla baby on Mom's back at the San Diego wildlife park blended with Proxy Falls in the Oregon Cascades.
I can't even make the basic tools work yet in PS, but are using a tutorial to create these although I have
to make a bunch more overlays to get them how I want.
It is a blend of two images but I overlay the BG two or three times to get the blending i want.
There must be an easier way...... although this only takes a few minutes after I do several
of attempts which I delete.

DSC_7928gorbp.jpg

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Dan,

Greetings. This one works for me. I particularly like how the hand appears to be grasping the rock. The eyes on the little one are great.

Started to write simple instructions on masking, painting masks, etc. but omg I forgot how complicated it is, how many things there are to understand. Eventually it comes without thinking too much about it. Since there are ten ways to do anything in particular, my advice is to just find a way to do what you want, get comfortable with that, then look for more efficient ways as your understanding of the tool set grows.

I used to use curves extensively. Sometimes ten or more curves layers, masking here, tweeking there. But since I've found some plugins that work to my taste for what I was doing in curves, so I hardly use curves anymore.

Since it's a moving target there isn't a way to know everything in PS, I just stick with the things that I want to know about and am willing to spend the time to learn. ymmv.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Cheryl Slechta]

Hi, Dan, another intriguing image - I'm really liking the waterfall composites and I love your title PS is the steepest learning curve I've ever had and just when I think I've learned something I quickly forget it so it is definitely a moving target. And masks were my biggest roadblock - I couldn't (and still can't) wrap my head around a lot of them. The one that I think is the easiest to remember I learned from Arthur Morris. If you've got an image with a layer on top (texture or an image for a composite) and you want to reveal part of the lower image, just click on the third symbol (to the right of FX) - it's a layer mask, then hit the keys B D X (brush, default, then the color). If black is on top that will reveal the bottom layer (you can change the opacity of the brush to your liking) and if you paint out too much, just hit X again and white will be on top and you can paint the bottom layer back in. You may already know all of this but if you didn't, it has made my life easier. There are always what seem like a hundred ways to do the same thing in PS but to me this is the easiest.

[Christopher Miller]

I like the blending you did here, Dan. The combination of the gorillas and the waterfalls works very well. The one thing I would change is to either reveal more of the momma gorilla, or remove the momma gorilla completely so that the baby gorilla looks like it's on rocks.

I do a lot of masking for my texture overlay images, and what I find works best is placing the texture or image that I want on top of the main image, reducing the opacity just enough so that I can see the bottom image, and then paint on a layer mask to reveal the bottom image(same way that Cheryl describes above). If I need a more precise mask, I will use quick mask and then make that into the layer mask.

[James Shadle]

The tech stuff has been covered so I'll just give you my gut reaction.
Weird but cool!

[Jackie Schuknecht]

I like the head/rock that the baby chimp is placing his hand on. The colours are beautiful, and I really like the image.