SP.747 Final project - “Outside the picture frame”OverviewSource imagesClone toolLayersThe handshakeOverall effectSP.747 Final project - “Outside the picture frame”By Lawrence WujantoOverviewMy original idea for this project was to take photographs of friends I had made and places I would remember of my time in Boston each with a picture frame, and then use Photoshop to place these pictures within each other, creating a repeating picture in a picture. This I did, using a simple white picture frame.However, the images seemed too disparate, causing the viewer to move from one image to another with little connection between images. Making another attempt at this project, I planned out a sequence of photos that would give the illusion of the subject of one image reaching out to shake hands with the subject of another image.Source images Due in part to the poor lighting in the place where the photographs were taken, and possibly the poor dynamic range of the camera, the series of photographs I took first needed colour correction. The white paint on the wall was a convenient reference for this purpose.In the second image, I hold onto a bottle as a prop that I would later swap with my finger from the first image, as we “shake hands”.Clone toolTo give the second image a more interesting context, I searched through my collection of photographs, and decided that Platform 9 ¾ at King's Cross (made famous by the story Harry Potter) would make a good backdrop. In order to remove the 2 subjects from the photo, I used the clone tool to use textures found elsewhere in the photo to patch over the regions I wanted to cover. This resulted in the image on the right.Illustration 1: Original ideaIllustration 2: Fourth source image with subjects removed.LayersUsing the magnetic lasso tool, I trimmed out the interiors of the picture frames, and the outline of the subject in the second image. These layers were then combined to a single image, and resized appropriately with the correct layering to give the picture in a picture effect. In order to make the inner images look more like they could be part of the picture frame, I blurred and adjusted the brightness of inner layers accordingly.The handshakeGetting the handshake to look realistic was somewhat challenging. With no cues to judge what angle to hold the bottle at or to point my finger in, it was difficult to get a good match. The bottle I was holding in fact got in the way of my hand, and I had to use the smudge and brush tools to “reconstruct” the missing parts (a small region of the palm). The layering of the picture larger picture frame required the smaller subject to be a lower layer, yet the layering of the fingers wrapping around the big finger required the smaller subject to be on a higher layer. To satisfy both constraints, the fingers had to be duplicated as a separate layer that sat on top of the larger subject.Overall effectOverall, the intended effect was to create a sense of people interacting with the pictures they carried, or characters in a picture coming to life. Similarly, one would hope that people may interact with this playful composition in some way or