A lot of people asked me if I actually went to the Taj Mahal in India for that picture I had in my last entry. Ok, so a lot of people haven't asked me that, I just wanted an excuse to show how I made it for the hell of it.

I started by taking some pictures of this paper puzzle model me and my daughter put together a few weeks ago.

After about 10-15 pictures of it I settled on this one.

I then took some pictures of myself pointing at the wall in our kitchen. I tried to keep as much white behind me as possible so it would be easy to clean up.

I did a google search for India trying to find something else to put in the picture and found this high tech engineer.

I brought all my pictures from my digital camera onto my computer and picked the best ones I could and loaded them into Photoshop. I did some erasing on the backgrounds, using the polygonal lasso tool for most of the Taj Mahal picture since it is straight edges for the most part. The other pictures were mostly free hand erasure.

I then pulled them into one image and scaled the pointing image and the elephant man down to fit the perspective and depth of the Taj Mahal in hopes of making it look larger. I did some color correction and level corrections on those layers as well so they would better match the Taj Mahal colors and brightness. I also flipped the elephant man, I thought it looked better.

For a background I just picked a relatively light blue (almost white) and a slightly darker blue and did a render clouds filter. The last step was to give the Taj Mahal and elephant man some depth since the camera was focused on me. For this I used a gaussian blur which put them out of focus.

OK, so it's not the best photoshopped picture in the world, but maybe you have some hints I could use. Post a comment if you have one. Rip me apart, I don't care.