Somewhere

For this project, I chose to put myself into an episode of one of my favorite TV shows, Criminal Minds. I had a lot of fun with this one! Even though Photoshop is definitely kind of my nemesis I feel like I've gotten more of a hang of it now and this project was overall a lot easier for me than others have been in the past. The most difficult part of the whole thing was probably adjusting the lighting on myself and then finding an image with high-enough quality that I could put myself in it. 

Originally, I wanted to put myself in a whole group shot, like the one above, to really show which show I was in. I have a very similar shirt to the girl sitting in white, Agent Ashley Seaver, so I figured it'd be easy to edit myself in if I had her as my background. But both of the above images were in I think 72 pixel format originally, and when I blew them up they just looked terrible and really pixelated, so I had to go back to the drawing board. At that point, though, I'd already taken pictures dressed as Agent Seaver, sitting down, so I decided to look for images where the characters were sitting down rather than try and reshoot the whole thing. 

This is the image I ended up going with, as well as the image I used of myself. I ended up flipping the picture of myself horizontally to better fit in with the scene, as I decided it'd be easier for me to put myself "holding" the file than just sitting plainly. I created a layer mask of myself to start, then positioned myself over the brunette woman - Dr. Alex Blake - at about 30% opacity so I could tell what I was doing. Then I used the lasso tool to roughly select the lower half of Dr. Blake's body (the file, her hand, and her suit jacket), created a new layer from the selection via copy, and placed the copied selection over top of me. Dr. Blake has slimmer shoulders than I do, so I had to cover the white shoulders of my shirt with the navy blue of her jacket with a mix of the brush tool and the clone stamp tool. I used the burn tool to darken up my hair and the clone-stamp tool to mix my hair with Dr. Blake's. After that, I used a hue/saturation layer, a vibrance layer, and a sepia photo filter to adjust the lighting on myself so that I looked more natural on the plane.