Just another photoshop experiment

I had to return a library book today that I never really got a chance to read. It came in shortly before Christmas and I just never found the time to devote to it. The book was Paula Guhin's Image Art Workshop and it's all about altering photographs (not digitally). Before it was returned this afternoon, I sat down with it and tried to power through the pages. As I looked through it, one technique in particular caught my eye and I thought, I could do that digitally.

What attracted my attention was photo weaving. In essence, take two photographs, the same size, that are either identical but with different colour tones (like the same photograph developed both in colour and in sepia) or two photographs that are very similar (like two portraits of the same face). Cut or tear them into strips, one horizontally and the other vertically, then weave them together using strips from both photos, creating one piece of art. The results are very cool.

The pelicans above are a result of my attempting this, but with my own spin. I was inspired by the idea but I went about it very differently. I opened the photo of the pelicans in photoshop, made some typical improvements (contrast etc), then duplicated the background and went a little crazy on the top layer -- over-saturating, cross-processing, changing the colour balance and much more. I then used the marquee tool, with the width set to the pixel width of the image and the height set to 400 pixels, and highlighted various strips of the top layer, cutting each strip away to make a new layer. I was then left with a top layer missing many strips. I turned that layer off, merged the strips into one layer, then increased the canvas size so I could play with the strips, moving them all a bit to the right to throw the whole thing off balance. I flattened the image and went back to the marquee too, now selecting strips from the blended image, this time turning those strips into sepia.

I then carried on, eventually bringing a texture into play, cropping the image and finally applying a clipping mask ... and, well, the finished result is what you see above. At first I considered it "unfinished", but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it just as it is! This is definitely something I will try again.