This is the culminating activity for my tech class. The assignment was to make a realistic surrealism picture by merging photos together.
Concept
My concept for the surrealism project was about how fast food effects our lives. By creating a fast food city,I thought I could demonstrate how much impact fast food has on our lives and how we are not aware of it. Fast food has become so main stream that we are not aware of how it effects our health. Fast food chains have become so globalized, that we can travel anywhere around the world and find the same fast food chains we have in North America. The sad part is that these fast food chains are on every block and every other commercial on TV is trying to sell you a burger or fries. The nutritional value of the food you consume at any one of these places is next to zero! I used images of fast food from the Internet and blended them into a image of a city skyline. I also added an image of people walking, which shows that we are oblivious of our surroundings.
Procedure
In the beginning I was really confused, and I didn't know where to start( it was my first time using the program ) . So then I went on google and started to read a bunch of tutorials on how to use blend photos on Photoshop. They were confusing and some hard to follow. Then I decided to try and start by just extracting the parts of the photos I didn't need to use. I used the extract tool and the eraser tool to take away everything but the fast food item. I started putting one on each layer and then I found an image of a city which I liked. The problem I faced when I was looking for images was the size, I had to make sure that they were large enough to use. After that, I used the lasso tool to cut out a building. I then placed it behind my Food item. I used soft light to make it was semi transparent so that the food item would look like a "food building". I placed them all together and then I used the eraser tool to blend them with the background. I also blended the people with the background. I was almost done but there was part of the image I didn't like so I used the lasso tool and selected part of the background, then I deleted it and placed it so that it looked good I also blended it in using the eraser tool.
In Conclusion
I wish I had more time to do this assignment, I think that it is so cool. Even though I'm not fully satisfied, I like the way it looks. I enjoyed learning about surrealism and I want to continue to learn more about it. If I could change anything it would be the people at the bottom and I would put in a lot more time into it and I would take all the photos myself. Overall I learned a lot from the tutorials and from playing around with the options, the next time I use photoshop I will do a much better job!
