Edit it Again Challenge

I started my composite photography journey in 2013. I learned all of my photoshop from

Edit it Again Challenge

watching creativelive.com, random youtube.com tutorials and a lot of trial and error. The first image from 2013 was one of my very first composite images. I had posted it on a facebook group for critique and they ripped it to shreds. I wasn't prepared for the brutal honesty I got but it motivated me to get better. I took every comment they made and turned it into a personal mission to perfect the necessary skills. It took me a long time to post composite work in that group again, and when I did I didn't get any feedback at all. Not crappy enough to tear apart, but not good enough to get positive comments either. Feeling totally ignored was pretty discouraging, but looking back now, I realize it was a sign that I was on the right path.

I decided to give this image another try, and edit it again with the skills I have acquired over the last 5 years. The first things that I noticed was that I used the wrong pose. My daughter was leaning against a chair in the first image,. Not quite standing, which makes for an awkward look if I am trying to pass it off as standing.

Not a good choice for composite

So I swapped that out for an image from the same shoot with a better matching pose and perspective. Learning what works well in composites has been mostly a subconcious process because until this exercise it wasn't something I had realized I had gotten better at.

In the first image I overlaid a image of a painting to give it color and texture, mostly I did this at the time to bring the image together and to to hide the fact that it looked choppy. I skipped this step altogether in my 2018 re-edit as I was not wanting to hide anything.

abstract oil painting

Overall I realized that choices made during the shoot impact how seamless an edit can be. I found it kind of challenging still to edit this image, simply because of factors in the original images that I would avoid doing now. For example the background images are taken in bright daylight, which was not ideal for transforming into a night scene.