Have you seen an excellent photo, such as a giant cat in the city or tiny people on a flower, such as Peter Pan or Tinkerbell? This is called photo manipulation. It is a technique of altering a photo by adding/stacking/removing certain parts of a picture and combining them with other images in the same frame.
Photo Manipulation: The Act of Transforming
Photo manipulation refers to the act of transforming a photo to achieve a desired result. Through the art of photo editing, you can turn images into true works of art and can be done using various photo editing tools or softwares.
Some might call it a fusion of photography and graphic design. Designers use numerous effects to transform images into something impressive. Their goal is to bring realism to unrealistic images.
The magic of high-quality manipulated images is that while you can understand that they don’t represent reality, the validity of the photos is worth considering!
1. Resolution is Everything
When working with images, you should think of pixels as the raw material of your media. Consider them as paint tubes to a portrait painter and bolts of fabric to a seamstress. Any craftsman will tell you that skimping on raw materials is a mistake.
Photo manipulation is no exception. Pixels tend to be stretched, squeezed, distorted, and otherwise abused. The more work you have to do, the easier the task and the better the result.
2. Light and Shadow
One of the essential tasks in creating reliable composites is consistent lighting. If an element in the scene has visibly different lighting and other shadows, it will never fit around. This is commonly known as the “green screen effect” because it’s common in television and film, where composite backgrounds have very different lighting than on-screen actors and actresses.
3. Burn and Dodge
Photo manipulation works that appear stylized, often with bright colors, highlights, and deep, deep shadow areas, are sometimes more successful in conveying the message or the feels. This approach often adds a fun and imaginative feel.
4. Add Realistic Textures
Adding textures to your photo manipulation editing projects makes it easy to recreate the level of detail you see in real life. Rather than meticulously trying to paint every fold of book leather, using textures is definitely saving more time and produces more convincing results.
5. Put it in the Right Light
Next to light and shadow, the most noticeable factor in photo manipulation is the wrong scale. Sometimes the exaggeration is intentional, and often that is the point of the work. However, inconsistent sizing of elements can create a strange feeling that something is “off”. When that happens, it breaks the suspension of disbelief, and the viewer instinctively knows that the image is visually unreliable.
6. Use Custom Brushes
Similar to realistic textures, brushes are a great way to add practical effects to your work with a quick ultimate control. Photoshop brushes are great. They are all relatively well-known and limited in their application to hand-drawn impacts.
7. Choose Images that Go Well with Each Other
To save a lot of time in compositing photo manipulations, choose pictures similar in color, lighting, and overall exposure. Otherwise, you’ll do much more work and probably won’t enjoy it.
8. Create an Image Cache
If you plan to do a lot of photo montages/compositing, it’s a good idea to have a collection of photos just for this purpose. Free stock photos like those on Unsplash are an excellent place to start, but often the best photos for compositing are from your camera.
9. Learn How to Perfect your Edges
Whether you’re compositing photos or simply removing unwanted elements from an image, it’s essential to learn how to clean up the edges of your selection. Sloppy edges are a big reason why photography art doesn’t work.
This is where Adobe Photoshop appears as the game changer. No other photo editing software can match Photoshop’s advanced selection tools. While you may be able to use AI in other programs, creating complex snippets can be very frustrating.
10. Learn Advance Tools
Most photo editing programs come with healing brushes, clones, stamps, and transform tools. Programs like Photoshop also have advanced options such as Liquefy, Warp, and Content-Aware Fill. To create a better result for doing the manipulation photo techniques, you will need advanced tools which do not come in cheap prices (yet worth it).
Practices Make Perfect!
Like they said, all the helpful guides remain useless until you practice in applying them to images. However, sometimes you feel like you do not have enough time to edit all the photos while at the same moment you need them to be perfected. This is where you need to consider consulting photo editing services and image retouching services. Dropicts provides the most comprehensive image editing services that aims to save you lots of time from doing photo manipulation by yourself.
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