Photomontage

After picture manipulation can photo montage been taught for children. It is basically working on layers as well but this time there are different pictures in on the layers. Each layer can be duplicated and changed of order again, and all the tools and actions learned before are to use again.

 

Photomontage, the final work

The photomontage is made of 5 different pictures (shown below) and multiple layers made of them.

 First of all I added all the layers into one picture. I opened all the pictures in GIMP and added each layer by dragging background layers (except the last one) over the picture I wanted to be as my background and added alfa channels on each of them. I scaled them into right size with scaling tool (left hand side toolbox, 3rd row, second tool from left in the picture below). I changed their color balances using curves tool (as presented in the article about photo enhancement) to fit all the colors together.

 Then I started all cutting work. I used lasso tool (point to point lasso) for selecting the area I wanted to remove (the screen shot above) and used erased for removing it (the screen shot below). I made other layers unvisible while working with one to make it easier to see what I've removed already.

Finally when I was comfortable with all layers and how they smoothly worked together, I started to work with the last picture to make it as a stamp. I changed it into black&white with desaturate action and curves tool (see the article about photo enhancing for both of these actions). Then I used magic wand (left hand side toolbox, 1st row, 4th tool from left) + delete to remove all the white areas.

In the layers box I changed the state of the layer as color. This state menu can be found above layers and opacity, and changed the opacity of the layer and erased some parts of it.

At last I merged down the picture and saved it as jpeg to be easily opened with any software.