This image shows what you can do by compositing images in photoshop. I started with a shot of me biting into a ball. This shot of the moon was added on a layer above and a mask was applied to reveal it where necessary. A quick google search for “star field” found the background. Another mask was applied and the composition was complete.

I know this has been done before but I decided it was time for my take on this classic piece of digital art. Like Future World I used an image of the world in the public domain. This time showing the Pacific as I thought it would blend into the blue of my left eye. My aim was to make it look as realistic as possible despite the unrealistic concept.

If you look closely I’m the one in the white T shirt. I took this shot of the Oakham Parade in Rutland. To process this image I did my normal trick of selective desaturation to draw the eye to the coloured area. I then did a similar thing with focus. I created an extra blurred layer and added a mask to it. By painting on the mask you effectively paint the focus back into the image in the areas you want it. The Reflection needed a different exposure from the rest of the image so I applied inverse masks to two curves and adjusted them to look how I wanted.

This was an interesting Photoshop challenge. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to do this as long as you can get your head round Photoshop masks. I started by taking a self portrait while trying to imagine the camera had just burnt down my favourite tree. I turned my skin blue by setting the cameras white balance to 2000K. After a quick google image search for “Avatar” I had two more images ready to be composited in Photoshop. One avatar poster which I can use for the skin and one close up of an avatar eye. The images only had one side so I needed to copy and flip them to cover my whole face. By having the eyes on separate layers I could move them to sit directly in line with my own pupils. The position of your main features is how your friends brains identify you. I used Photoshops liquify to change the shape of my nose and mouth. I applied a mask to each layer to blend them together. Finally I darkened one side of the face so to make the lighting appear more realistic.

Karen took this is a shot of me on Hadrians wall. The sky was almost completely blown out in order to capture as much detail as possible in the stones. I managed to squeeze out some more detail by using an extreme tone curve. You can see from the gray bar chart the original image had almost no mid-tones.