Propaganda Photomontage

 

I had originally started a different photo montage and spent a lot of time using layers and masks but then came upon the original photo of former President Mubarak yesterday on my Yahoo homepage.  I instantly thought of the old Uncle Sam poster and wanted to mix it up a bit.  For each image I first duplicated my background, as it is always a good idea to back up the original.  Too many times I have spent hours editing a picture just to mess up and have to start all over again but did not have the original to start with.  I also added an extra layer that I filled with an off white color to place below the image I was editing (this makes it easier to edit).  Then I used the "quick selection" tool to outline the objects in each picture.  I then used "refine edge" and a mask as displayed on page 163 or our Quickstart Guide to get all the edges.  After this I was able to make a new layer with only the selected image.  On a new file I started dragging and dropping the selected images.  Once this was done I transformed each image to fit to size.  I also did a little more transforming on the Uncle Sam hat to make it look a bit more like a mad hatter hat. I desaturated the image of Mubarak because I thought leaving it in color would distract from the message.  After all was said and done, i then merged all my visable files to make this image.