Somewhere

For our "Somewhere" picture, we had to place ourselves somewhere that we had never been before.  For mine, instead of choosing a place around the world, I chose a place in history.  I have never been in the exact moment that this famous kiss between two strangers was captured on camera.  With the help of my boyfriend and photoshop, I now have a picture as if I were there, and as if those two strangers were me and my boyfriend.

To create this picture, I first found the image of the famous kiss online via Google:

http://www.complex.com/style/NaN/Invalid%20date/famous-kissing-photographs/v-j-day-in-times-square-by-alfred-eisenstaedt

Next, I recruited Zach and took this picture:

The key here was taking the picture with a neutral background so it would be easier to crop us out, which was the next step in this process.  In photoshop, I hid all other layers on the file and used the magic wand tool to select the entire background of the above picture, so all that was left was me and Zach.  Here's what that looked like when I was done:

Just a little side note here, the neutral background is a MUST, especially if you're cropping around strands of hair, like I had to do with mine.  If you don't have a neutral background, it becomes very easy to crop out strands of hair or to make it look unnatural and stiff.

Anyways, the next step was to make the original picture of the kiss visible again and position me and Zach so that we were over the nurse and sailor.  The goal here was to make it look as though this picture was taken of us, and not the strangers:

Looking good!  But obviously this picture can't be real!  I mean, me and Zach are in color and everything else is black and white!  I can totally fix that though:

There we go!  Looks great!  After this, I went on to adjust some of the settings within the different layers to make it look more realistic, as if we were actually there, and the end result is the picture at the top of this post!  Personally, I think this picture turned out pretty good!  I hope you all like it!