This week I have spent a lot of time on Photoshop CS6 digitally manipulating medical illustrations. As you are probably aware from my previous blog posts I did struggle doing this to begin with, however persistence and step-by-step guides meant that yesterday I was finally able to finish all ten manipulations.
The process of my images were all very similar and only varied slightly. Each image began with a medical illustration providing the framework as a background layer.
From this I carefully selected other images and subjects that I believed to help portray the desired emotion. These where then individually added as separate layers. To enable the layers to blend professionally and seamlessly I added vector masks and used the paint brush tool- black to erase particular areas, and white to re-add them back in. I found this to be a helpful tool in removing backgrounds, ensuring the images fit within my framework image and also to enable to layers to be woven between the anatomy which overall increased the effect of my images.
The opacity feature was also very useful as it enabled me to be in control of how much or little of the front layer was visible. This was not always enough to create the desired effect so to enable the images to blend the way I wanted them too I had use the blending options for each level. The blending options provide many different options to choose from such as hard or soft light, multiple or subtract etc.
I also found that adding adjustment layers was useful as they enabled the adjustments to be applied to the entire image, thus pulling all the individual layers together.
