The Ocean’s Final Performance…

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Sheryl Checkman

Being the beach lover that I am, I find it hard to say goodbye to summer. Living as I do in the Northeast, my days of beach-going usually last just past Labor Day or the middle of September. I paid the ocean one last visit a couple of weekends ago when I went to visit a friend in Sag Harbor on the eastern end of Long Island. After kayaking in the bay in the morning, we drove to our favorite beach in Amagansett – Atlantic Ave Beach. The sky was bright blue and crystal clear and even though it was late in the day and there had been a chill in the air by the bay earlier, the sun on the beach felt warm against my skin. The colors of the water, the sky and the beach were vivid and vibrant – much more so than in the middle of summer when the humidity often casts a gauzy haze over the seascape. But on that day, everything was super focused, sharp and clear, making sure that picture would remain with me throughout the rest of the year.

It must have known that this was my final visit for the year because the ocean put on the most spectacular show! Huge waves, curling perfectly and then crashing down in perfectly timed sets performed a magnificent dance. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I must have taken over 200 photos in the hour and a half that I was there! And way too soon it was time to leave the beach and that glorious ocean and head back to the city and towards a new season. But the ocean remains. It will continue to dance throughout the year, and while I may not be there for each performance, I will remember this last one until I return next summer.

Go with the Flow Ocean and beach lover t-shirt for those who love the ocean be reminded of it all year long!

How to Create a Digital Photo Montage

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Sheryl Checkman

I thought I’d take a break from my “Balance” series to introduce you to one more facet of my creative life in the hope that it might inspire you. I created above photomontage to celebrate the adoption of my friend Susan’s oldest daughter from China. Photomontages make wonderful gifts and are a creative way to honor a person or event. I started making photomontages for friends and family to celebrate milestone birthdays, weddings and Bar Mitzvah’s. The finished product, when printed on the right paper is suitable for framing.

1. The first thing you’ll need are some photographs. 5-15 images are good to start with. Adding pictures of documents such as birth announcements or wedding invitations or other tokens that have meaning to the recipient can add some interest to your montage. You’ll also need Adobe PhotoShop.

2. If your photos are not digital (those great old photos from childhood rarely are) scan them at a high resolution (at least 300dpi) at the size that you think you’ll want to use them, or larger. This is so that when re-sizing images to fit in a layout you won’t end up with pixelated images.

3. Decide what size you want your final printed piece to be. This is important since once you have finished your project you’ll want to reproduce it without losing quality. For printing on an ink-jet printer you’ll need at least 150dpi at the size that you want it. If you designed your piece to be 8-1/5 x 11 at 300dpi, the effective resolution of a blow-up of 17 x 22 would be 150dpi.

4. Set up your photoshop document to the size and resolution that you want with a transparent background.
Look at your photos and decide upon a rough layout. Is there one photo that calls out to be the centerpiece? If it’s for an anniversary, maybe the couple’s wedding photo. This is a creative project so you decide what looks good. You can always change things if it doesn’t look right once you get going.

5. Open the images that you want to make a part of the montage and drag a couple onto the new document. Make sure that the image resolution is the same for both the images and the new document or your images are going to re-size according to the document’s resolution. This is ok if your images are larger than the new document (you can then just re-size them down if you need to) BUT you don’t want to re-size images up.

6. You’ll see that each image that you dragged over is now on a separate layer. Roughly place various images next to and overlapping each other to form an attractive layout. Pay attention to backgrounds that might blend well together when choosing which photos to place next to which.

7. The key to creating photomontages is layer masks. Using layer masks will allow you to make non-destructive changes to your images which can be easily undone if you need to change them later. I learned this after using the eraser tool and later discovering that I couldn’t put something back that I had erased a few saves ago!
Select your layer and select Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All. (Make sure that the layer mask is highlighted when making your edits.)

Using the brush tool, and making sure that the black is in the foreground of the tool palette, you can now erase away parts of the images that you want to hide so that and parts of the image in the layer below that was hidden is now viewable. If you make a mistake, switch to the white foreground and you can paint your image back in. Play with the size of the brush and it’s opacity for more creative options. I tend to use a fairly soft brush to avoid any hard edges.

8. SAVE OFTEN! You don’t want to spend hours on your masterpiece only to lose all your work if you computer suddenly decides to freeze (it happens, I know from experience).

9. When you are satisfied with your montage save your layered photoshop file for future reference. Then flatten your layers and SAVE AS a jpg or tiff file for printing.

50th Birthday digital photo montage for a sailor and a dad

10. Then print on your ink jet printer. I recommend using Epson Enhanced Matte Photo paper. Also, to be sure that your image looks as good on paper as it does on screen, make sure to adjust the settings for your printer in the print dialog box. Set the paper type based upon which paper you’ve chosen and ask PhotoShop to manage color. All you need now is a frame!

If this all sounds greek to you and you have an upcoming event or occasion that you like some help creating a custom photomontage for feel free to call on me. Click here for more info and to see more of my photomontage work.

If it’s in a photograph, is it really there?

Posted on January 10, 2010 by Sheryl Checkman

Red Tree super-imposed over the Central Park West cityscape

Did you ever wish you could make up your own landscape? Painters do it all the time. They might take some mountains from one place and a lake from somewhere else and paint them together to create their own Shangri-La. I used to paint — back when computers were practically non-existent and I was a budding artist at the High School of Music & Art in NYC in the early 70’s. I painted landscapes in oil on canvas. I was ok, but not destined for greatness as a fine artist so I traded in my paint brushes for a career in graphic design. It’s a way to earn a living, while still being creative, but sometimes I still get the itch to create just for myself.

Now with a digital camera and Adobe PhotoShop CS4, I can once again use my imagination to create new landscapes (and seascapes for that matter) right on my computer. I can add my own touch to nature!

How do I do this? I use the layers palette in PhotoShop CS4 to combine the two photographs that were used to make up the finished image above. Each photo gets its own layer. The photo with the red tree is on the base layer and the buildings on Central Park West are on a layer above. I then add a layer mask to “reveal all” to the buildings layer. Now, making sure that I have the layer mask selected on the layers palette, I use the paintbrush to brush away the parts of the buildings photo that I don’t want. I adjust the opacity of that layer to give the photo a more distant look and making the red tree layer pop more. By using layer masks instead of the eraser tool to get rid of unwanted parts of an image, my original images are untouched so that if I need to go back and add parts back in I can. When I get the composition the way I want it, and after I have saved the PSD file, I then flatten the final image and save as a tiff, a png or jpg file and I am done.

The above image is available for purchase at my Dive Art & More gallery

Below are the two original images that I used: