Manipulations

Have you ever heard about elk in sunset?

Forget about the elk and the sunset. This is the story about two deers in sunrise! But, there was no sunrise together with the deers,
Actually,  they were even not there at the same time,  together!  How does that come? 

Keep on reading, and I will give you more!
 

Using computers and image editors, it is easy and fun to handle photos.  And you are able to go far out and create images that never existed.  Just take a look at the photo beneath this text.

The photo is put together of 3 images.  All of them is shot at different times by a friend of mine, that gave me free assets to do as I wanted with them.

All photos are shot with a digital camera, and the images are converted from the "RAW" files in the memory card to TIFF files and saved on a disk

Then the editing process started. 
First I adjusted colours, lightness and contrast to enhance the details.
Then I opened a new empty image with the width of both the read deer images, and a bit higher. Copied and pasted the deer images  side by side in layers, trying to joint the logs together. As they were a bit vertically displaced, I had to fill in more snow above one of them and beneath the other. Now I merged the layers to fixate them, Did a selection around the image to make a clean cut. Copied and pasted as a new image. And saved it on disk.

The image of the great sunrise was now loaded into the editing program and resized to the same with as the merged deer image.
Another new picture frame, sized as the deer image + sun raise image + a little bit more was now opened.
The deers and sun raise now was put together, adjusted and merged and saved.

To make all the joints less visible, I spray-painted the images with the "Air Brush" tool, Using near by colours.  I also used the Clone Brush.  Especially on the logs. 
The "field" behind the deers, (moor, lake or whatever you might like to call it), is just a farm road.  The distance from the deers to the other side of it,  is only about 15 - 20 m.  To the hill side, however, it is about 1 Km.  To make it look like a 1 Km field, I just had to blur it.  Make it look like an early, foggy  morning.
As you can see at the thumb nails, there is a sharp border line, witch I had to soften a bit.
Finally, I gave it a touch of colour balance, to make the "fog" reflect the sky.

The photos of the deers, was taken over several days in the early twilight time in the morning.
The photos were taken trough a multi layer window pane.  No flashlight, and not extra light was used. 
The great sun raise was taken at another time of the year, but in the same direction.

All photos are taken by Arne Myklebust
Camera Canon 10D

Sun raise photo is told to be taken with focal length about 220 mm.