About the Image(s)

I’m a retired high school English teacher so by law I must quote Shakespeare. This composite was a “joyful trouble.” I started by placing 4 women behind her own window. Then, I used a layer mask to trim the overlap of each woman to fit comfortably behind her window and Merged the two Layers giving me a total of 4 women behind windows. After all of the Layers were Merged, each window occupied its own Layer so overlapping the windows was simply a matter of moving one layer on top of another and using the Layer Mask to correct any conflict that the overlapping might have created. I used Photoshop’s Free Transform tool to control the size, perspective, and slant of the 25 windows that comprise the composite. There was a lot of Layer copying and resizing involved in getting the final 25 windows. My original vision was to have the Wizard’s sweep of windows appear in 3 levels, but the small windows were just too small. Trying to form 3 levels while controlling the sizes of more than 25 windows contributed to the “joyful trouble.” Nik Software’s Viveza helped bring out the color in the women’s outfits. I find it’s more sensitive than Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. The disk on which the wizard is standing was created by Photoshop’s Ellipse Tool.
I can’t afford models so I create my own when I find them. The woman in Original 3 was a London street performer enjoying being the mad hatter. The other three women were performers in stage productions on various cruises. The wizard was an actor at a costume-party wedding. All wedding guests were invited to come in medieval costumes and join the actors who were dressed in their medieval attire as they performed their roles.