Photoshop Collage

The discovery of collage is one of the biggest achievements that helped to increase the artists' and designers' capabilities. Collage helps to combine other different images and ideas not connected between each other in one unique feature. If you are interested in this amazing topic, please visit some sites about collages:
collage-portfolio of Claudine Hellmuth; collages from Lithuania (I spent several years in this country. That is why it was interesting for me to explore this site); collages Cy de Groat; one more good site.

I developed my first web page and placed a collage image created in Adobe Photoshop there. As a theme I chose the images from St.-Petersburg, Russia and tried to combine real and imagined. St.-Petersburg is a really wonderful city. There are so many places of interest that you can spend your whole life visiting and discovering them. St.-Petersburg is one of the biggest cultural cities in the world. One of the nicknames of St.-Petersburg is "The Venice of the North"(referring to St. Petersburg's numerous rivers and canals). And can you believe the fact that the city has the largest number of bridges in the entire world?! If you try Google images you will be really surprised how beautiful all the bridges are! So, I tried to show some images of bridges combined with other images of the city. I used two digital pictures that were taken last year by my brother. I also scanned one postcard with the Trotsky Bridge. The rest of the images were taken from St.-Petersburg.com

As a result I had 12 layers and several text layers in Photoshop.
Working on my collage image I discovered a plenty of new features and tools in Photoshop. I tried selecting objects using Rectangular, Elliptical Manquee and Polygonal Lasso tools. I also used Magic Wand tool which allows you to select a consistently colored area (for example, a blue sky) without placing a line around its outline. You can specify the color range, or tolerance, for the Magic Wand tool's selection. While selecting I used feather command. It softens, smoothes or blurs the border of a selection. So the changes you make blend in better or naturally with its surroundings. You can correct the width of the feathered edge by entering different values from 0 to 250 pixels. I applied different layer styles (inner shadow, outer and inner glow, bevel and emboss and others). I experimented in using filters. As a result I used some artistic variations on several images. I also used a new tool for me - Liquify tool. It works as a brush, which allows you to apply different effects to the selected image. I placed some names of the bridges on my image. I used several fonts such as Zapf Chance, Unicorn, FuturaLight and others. You can also apply different effects to the text properties (the same as to the layers). You can place the text not only horizontally, but also along an arc, in a form of flag, wave and in other variations.

I created a collage image that combines real and imagined objects. Many famous artists (Braque, Picasso, Tzara and L. Aragon) produced so called collages. Collage is more than only selecting, cutting and pasting. You can get a new meaning to your work. Collage recombines found objects. A good example of a found object is the work of Marcel Duchamp "Fountain". He showed that "the context of found objects and their relationships to each other play a key role in their meaning" [1]. Collage can be created from images, web pages and even sounds (music).

A.Kerne in his article "Using Composition to Re-Present Personal Collections of Hypersigns" explains how CollageMachine ("tool for using composition to represent personal collections of hypersigns") works. He explains how to create a composition using different tools from the toolbar. I really enjoyed playing with the images using his site. A.Kerne believes that creating a collage brings a new meaning to the new object.

R.Pyke's article Digital Images and Photojournalism was published in PSA Journal, July 1998 [2]. Though it is not quite modern, the ideas and problems that he raises are very actual. R. Pyke writes about Adobe Photoshop as software used to create new images "limited by the operator's imagination". He criticizes images that do not show the truth because it is difficult to analyze whether such images are real or they were created in Photoshop. And I agree with him. A person should know the truth about what he sees. R. Pyke's understanding of using Photoshop is different from what A.Kerne thinks. While creating my image I tried to show some places in the city for everybody to understand what they really are.

References
1. Adruid Kerne Collage Machine: An Interactive Agent of Web Recombination Leonardo, Vol33, No.5, 2000
2. Ralph E. Pyke Digital Images and Photojournalism PSA Journal; Jul98,Vol.64 Issue 7