Voyiazis – Photoshop Tutorial

In MDMZ’s Photoshop Composition Tutorial video about photo manipulation, he goes into detail showing the process of collaging and combining great aspects from completely different photos to create a surreal final composition and subject matter. While in his case, the end result might seem a bit stretched from reality, the skills he shows can be put to better use for color compensation, blending, and adding additional elements to a piece. Although there is no commentary, the video provides great info and detail about the steps to enhance multiple images. Also, the pace of the video is not too fast, and still clearly depicts the buttons being pressed or operations being executed.Stacking of layers to blend a composition with an existing sky. One interesting operation was differentiating the subject and the sky so that the sky can be erased simply and quickly with one selection. This is one helpful tool that I never knew the name of where to find it, and it’s called the rasterize tool which automatically selects and differentiates subjects in the composition for selecting. I’ve always tried to put different backgrounds to an image and I’ve always done it the slow way wherein you use the pen tool to manually go around all edges and create a loop that way. He also comes back a lot to the blend and fade tool which was used to blend the background of one image into the background image’s sky. One thing that I thought was really cool to know about photoshop was that there are stencils available. I never knew stencils existed, and the way they were used in the video to make a fog cloud was very interesting. I feel that the stencils could be put to use as well in making fictional maps, bodies of water, or clouds in the sky since the fill color can be anything. Towards the end, the video also provides a good example of using a histogram and the balance lines to balance the image’s saturation as well as observe the range of different values in the work. I plan on using this tutorial to correct some old photographs that I’ve taken before I knew as much about my camera as I do now. I have a few outdoor photos with whitewashed skies and I feel that it wouldn’t be too hard to bring in an entirely new sky and blend it well enough so that it is unnoticeable. 

Mehrez, Mohamed. “The Making of Photo-Manipulation: Explore | Photoshop Compositing Tutorial.” Youtube, uploaded by MDMZ, 16 August 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ckMwQxc1s.