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The exercise involved many of the things we've learned so far, including compositing, selecting, erasing, layer masking, copying and cutting, painting, cloning, transform, image adjusting, and the USM. When finished, I resampled downward quite a bit, since the main image - Niagara's Horseshoe Falls- was ~3200 x 2000 pixels in size. I used the "optimize for web" feature in PS to convert to a medium quality jpg for this web use.
The background image is a scan of a faded slide of Niagara Falls which I took back in the '70's on a very hazy day. The boat scene was scanned from a (medium format) photo of my old Lightning (long departed), and me, from too many years ago to even think about! :)
After matching the image displays, I selected the boat and put it on its own layer, and then selected myself and did same. For effect, I placed the boat on the brink of the Falls, and located the front-to-back position where the scale would match the larger image. Then I flipped and rotated, and distorted the boat slightly to present an image of a stressed-out mast and hull. The lighting angle of the two images seemed to match OK. I think this is critical in order to fake our brains out, which is what I'm trying to do here! <smile>
One "trick" I stumbled across was that by selecting my arm up to the shoulder, and flipping it vertically, I could make it look like I was waving to shore. (The arm in the original photo was down at my side.) To "sink" the boat into the water of the background image, I duplicated that image, put it on top in the layer palette, and erased down till I reached the water level I wanted along the topsides of the boat.
It was difficult having to purposely fuzz up the second image to match the first, but I couldn't do it the other way round. In the end, I decided against using my Niagara Parks "NO Swimming" sign in the foreground! ;) All-in-all, a good learning experience, and a lot of fun as well.
