For my Final Collage project, I chose to have a theme of family and joy. The background in this photo has no significance to my main theme, but it was chosen because the landscape is captured from a beautiful ocean. It was included also because the texture of the jagged rocks was a great contrast to go with the other textures including the smooth organic edges of the pictures and the colors of the sky, and ocean water kept the collage from looking monotonous. The overall value was edging towards light and didn't have to many fluctuations between the light and dark values.
There were a variety of different tools that I utilized in my collage. The most used tool/technique to create my collage was cropping pictures out of their background, adding a layer mask, and brushing away extra bits using the black and white brush. I used the hue and saturation adjustment for the graduation picture and used the default "increase saturation" because it made the hues of all the colors "pop" to my liking. Then I used the vibrance adjustment to increase the saturation to +6 and the vibrance to +10.The reason for using this tool was because the picture to begin with had a dark value and was taken around not that much light. When I played around with this tool, I found that it suited my liking with the value that it came out with. The rest of the tools I used were just from Transform, such as altering the size and rotation of the picture. For final touches, I used the Spot Healing Brush tool to fix up little blemishes.
When it came to analyzing my collage, I thought of some things I could have included or fixed to enhance it. To make all of the pictures even blend in more, I should have fixed all of the shadows of the pictures, like how we did on the exercise with the lady on the books. Next, I had trouble with deciding whether I should have cropped the graduation picture and now looking back, I regret not doing so because all if I did, it would have given a better unity since all of the other pictures were cropped. After everything, I was still pleased with how it came out and I am very grateful for learning the skill of creating collages. Now, I can of great use to my mom with her scrap booking collage projects.
