Composition on Color, or "Cats in Heat"

My Own Background

Originally, for this assignment, I had one of those early moments of pure ambition, creativity, and impulse. I downloaded a bunch of free images of fireworks and I had the idea of photoshopping them into someones eyes. I also wanted many pictures of cats included with lots of warm colors that popped. Then, when I actually sat down to find the right photo, obviously, it didn't work out. But I decided to stick with the cats and the reds, oranges, and yellows against black, especially when I found this old photo on my phone of Fox Tower's silhouette against the sunset in Henry Park, Vernon, CT.

Main Cat

 I simply began by sizing the background photo to 10x14. Then, it took me much time to lasso another free image of a cat on a branch in front of a moon. I wanted to remove the moon and just get the silhouette. The magnetic lasso was giving me a hard time every time I started tracing the cats tail and I wanted the branch to look skinnier and more crooked, so I did the regular lasso by hand and stuck the cat in a tree. I had left a little bit of the red moon from the original image in the copy on accident, so I went over that with a small black paintbrush to blend it into the tree. To make this image look more natural, I used the blur tool, decreased the hardness, and made it pretty tiny and then zoomed in a lot so I could trace a blur accurately and melt the layers together.
 For the main kitty, the large grey one, I wanted it to look like it was gazing up at the sky, unaware of the rest of the scene around it. I thought this was a very well focused photo and I wanted to include the whiskers. I used the magnetic lasso to select the cat, excluding the parts of the whiskers that were outside of the cats frame, zooming in to match the fur as best I could (this was easy since the cat was against black already). Then, I used the polygonal lasso on two different sections of his whiskers, (the ones on his head and the ones on his nose). I had tried using the magnetic lasso, but I found it much easier just being able to control the straight lines myself. Then, I pasted the image onto my composition and lines up his whiskers the best I could. I ended up erasing one of them near his nose, because I just lassoed it too thick. I used a combination of the blur tool and a high-opacity black paintbrush to blend the cat into the black more. I added some translucent black around the top of his head and his right ear to add more depth and make him look more like he was actually in the scene rather than just plastered on top. I used a 12% opacity to achieve this.

Fireworks and more

So, I decided to add the reflection of fireworks to the cats eye anyway. I roughly lassoed an image of two fireworks bursting together, kind of tracing around some defined lines, but more just circling it. Then I pasted it onto my composition and scaled it waaaayy down to fit inside the cat's eye. For all images, I went to Edit, Transform, and then Scale. To make it look like a reflection, I went to Edit, Fill, chose the Clear option and put Opacity at 20%. Then, I made my Blur brush very small, zoomed in, and circled the fireworks to blend it in. I used the brush tool to add a subtle, opaque white back to the gleam that was originally in the cats eye, and used a size 1 black brush to get that little slit in the cats eye more defined.
Then, I put an image of a different fireworks that'd be easier to lasso in the sky above the scene. But this time I had to lasso the fireworks more carefully and blend the color of the sky using the blur and brush tools. I was going to do the same Clear fill I had on the other fireworks, but it decreased the intensity of the brightness and color by a lot. I used the eyedropper tool to take the color of the sky in the background photo, brought opacity to 25% and the size of the brush down to 3px and blended in some of the harsh black lines in the firework.

I added two kittens in the foreground, roughly magnetic lassoed them and copied and pasted them into the composition. I blurred around their bodies with a small blur tool and then did a small black brush with 13% opacity just to make them look like they're more a part of the dark ground they're on. I added a close up shot of the sun and scaled it down to look like a ball the cats are playing with, using the eyedropper to made a opaque yellow and blend the sun in.

The last image I added was a plane, and I choose a free image of one in front of either a sunrise or sunset, so that it would blend with the sky in the background well. All I did with it is scale it down and blur out the edges a bit.

Adjustments

For some reason I couldn't make adjustments to the entire image as a whole, so I saved the project, reopened it and then started playing. I increased the exposure by 51+. As for the color balance, I did +53 Red, -43 Magenta, and -48 Yellow. I wanted my composition to be focused on color, since I chose that out of all the topics given on the assignment description. I wanted the reds and yellows of the sky, fireworks, and sun to be intensified and blend together beautifully.


****The background image is my own, and all other images included were found on pexels.com****