From: Daniel Piechnick
Date: 01 May 2004
Time: 11:23:11
Remote Name: 203.217.0.204
http://www.geocities.com/beitahan/pics/edndear.jpg Hi Edward. Trying to add something to a picture is never easy. I've tried to do it myself, and it's always been very tricky. The biggest problem here is that the photos are different in so many ways. First, the scale. I think you have the size wrong. I don't know you, but from the picture you look very big. I can see you've tried to make your head the same size as hers, but really, your head should be smaller, as you're further back in the photo. Your hand also looks very small, almost like it's a petite woman's hand. The second, and biggest problem, is the blurriness, which I'm sure you're aware of. This would be general blurriness due to the quality of the camera, and motion blur, due to the photographer using a hand-held camera. There are also problems with the colour. Your picture is much less vibrant than hers. The third problem is the lighting. The photo of the woman in this shot is of a very high quality. You'll also notice that the hair that's hanging in front of her face isn't casting any shadows. This is almost certainly because multiple light sources (i.e. in a studio) were used, while your photo had normal lighting. This makes at look as if she is standing in front of everything in thw photo. Ok... now onto the solution. Let me start by reiterating that you're trying to do something very difficult here. :) You'll need to reduce the quality of the woman's photo, by blurring it, motion blurring it, and reducing the Saturation (Ctrl+U). Re-do the outline of her shoulder, and use less points this time. Make her cast a shadow onto your top. Remember to re-size yourself, and re-do your hand. Remember to give yourself a thumb this time :) Once you've done this, post the results to this forum, so we can all see what happened :)
