How I use Adobe Photo Shop to create better reference photos .

Have you ever searched through your reference photos for something to paint and thought.. Oh if only this photo had something extra in it ,or, I wish there wasn't that distracting element in it ? Well with Adobe Photo Shop you can manipulate your photos any way you want to. Often I have found photos that I want to combine, in fact ,if I do use photos as reference for a painting it will never be based just on one photo but rather of two or three.

Below are two photos that I had taken in the same village,I loved this little blue shop and really wanted to paint it but I felt that it needed something else.On the way to the village we had passed a family in a donkey cart.Pointing my little digital camera out the side window I took a quick snap shot as we drove passed.The photo of the donkey cart and family was not straight which was not surprising ,due to the way it had been taken. 

I had a couple of problems with combining the two photos .(1) The donkey cart was crooked and it looked like it was going up hill.(2) The shadows in the donkey cart photo was falling in the opposite direction to the blue shop .(3) In the original photo the donkey cart and family were so small that they would appear as miniatures next to the blue shop.Using Adobe Photo Shop I was able to .

(1) Straighten and crop the donkey cart photo.(2) Invert the donkey cart photo so that that the shadows were now falling more or less in the same direction as the blue shop.(3) Finally I cut out the donkey cart the family and its shadows and pasted it in the blue shop photo,I also enlarged the donkey cart to the right size so that it would look like it belonged next to the blue shop. I also used the paint tools to paint in shadows,and to paint over objects in the photo that I did not want ,like the donkey that was standing under the tree.

               Now I had a photo to work from which I did not have before .

       The finished oil painting . Titled. ( Father and son at Bodibeng Village)

                                                      SOLD