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 I have been thinking about creating a "phoenix graft" on a section of a dead tree (shown above), using collected larix laricina that are young and flexible. A phoenix graft is a process of making grooves in a dead tree-trunk, and placing the trunks of live trees into the groove, with each live trunk rooted in the soil. In order to figure out where to cut the grooves, and where the foliage pad will be placed, I used the Photoshop program on my computer. I did not want to use the drawing capabilities of Photoshop - I prefered to use real foliage, in order to make the final image more realistic, and get a better idea of the outcome. I used the images of foliage from a larch I have had for many years, because the foliage was in compact pads that were easy to copy, and paste onto the dead trunk picture. There is an endless number of things that can be done with Photoshop, but for this exercise, I am only going to discuss the use of a few of the tools from the toolbox, and show a simple way to take the foliage from one digital image and place it on another digital image.  LASSO TOOL
 Select the lasso tool from the toolbox. Position the cursor on the part of the picture you want to use (see picture 1 above), single click and hold down the mouse button as you draw a line around the part of the picture you want to use. A dotted line will appear to show what you have selected. MOVING TOOL
Select the moving tool. Single click the cursor on the selected foliage, and continue holding down the mouse button as you drag the foliage from one picture to the other (seen on the right, moving the foliage from picture 2 to picture 3 below).   When the foliage is placed onto picture 3, the LAYERS box on the desktop will show that a layer has been added on top of the background (the new layer will be automatically titled "Layer 1"). This new layer floats on top of the background and can be modified in many ways, and moved around in the image, without having any effect on the background. As additional pads of foliage are grabbed from image 1, and dragged over to image 3, a new layer will appear for each time this is done, and the LAYERS box will number each seperate action as a new layer. I had 7 layers of foliage pads to make my final image. As I added new foliage pads, I usually had to reposition the previous pads so they looked right. In order to move a particular foliage pad, you must select it¹s name in the LEVELS box‹click on the name and it will turn gray to show it has been selected. Once a particular level is selected, only that level will move when you use the moving tool. If the foliage is not the correct size, angle, or alignment, use the EDIT menu, scroll down to TRANSFORM and there you will find many choices to change the image. For whatever action you select, a box will appear around the foliage. The box can be manipulated by clicking the cursor on the edges of the box and dragging. The problem with the foliage pad pasted into picture 3 is that the lassoed foliage from picture 1 retains a lighter-coloured background than the background of picture 2. This ligher-coloured background can be eliminated in a simple way. MAGIC WAND TOOL  Select the magic wand tool from the toolbox. Single-click the cursor on any area of the background (See picture 4 above). The magic wand will select all areas of the same colour, as long as the areas are attached to each other. If you click on the area marked with an X, the entire area indicated with a dotted line will be selected. Press the keyboard DELETE key and the selected background will disappear. Now this area of the background is transparent and the branches and background of picture 1 can be seen through it. There are two more areas of background on the left side of the selection that also need to be removed in the same way (indicated by a white dot in picture 4, and removed in picture 5 below).  If something is selected by the magic wand, and you wish to deselect it, single click somewhere in the picture outside the selected area and the line of dots will disappear, indicating that the area has been deselected. There are still two small sections of trunk that were included in the original selection of the foliage and are indicated in picture 5 with a white dot. These need to be removed as well. Since the trunk has a variety of colour, the magic wand is not useful for selecting what needs to be removed. The correct tool is the eraser.  ERASER AND ZOOM TOOLS Select the eraser tool from the toolbox (not the "background eraser" or the "block eraser" shown in the submenu). There is a lot of choice for this tool. It can be a pencil, which has a characteristic hard edge. It can be a brush (this means "airbrush") and has a characteristic fuzzy edge. I prefer the pencil in this situation in order to get a cleaner line. There is also a choice of size. Experiment with some sizes until you get one you like. The third choice is opacity. If it is set at 100%, wherever you draw, the image will be eliminated totally. If the opacity is set at 50%, wherever you draw, the image will be half as dark. Use 100% opacity and erase the areas of tree trunk. If you want to work on the image at a bigger size, select the zoom tool and click on the image. It will get bigger each time you click (the cursor will show as a + sign). If you want the image smaller, use the keyboard and OPTION-click the cursor (for Macs), or ALT-click (for PCs), the cursor will show as a minus sign, and the image will get smaller. When everything is the way you want it, the image can be saved as a photoshop file, and worked on again in the future. If the image is finished, and you do not intend to work on it in the future, go the the LAYER menu and to FLATTEN IMAGE. This will make the picture become one layer, and the image can be saved as a jpg or tif. The next step with this image is to use Photoshop to draw the new trunks where they would appear on the larger dead trunk. CLONING TOOL
This tool is handy for adding additional foliage. When this tool is selected, click the cursor on a part of the image you wish to duplicate, and then move the cursor to another part of the image. As you move the cursor with the mouse button held down, you will be continuously copying the place where you first clicked. There are the same choices as the erasing tool for pencil vs. brush, size and opacity. It is a very useful tool. Try it.
 Bob's article can be downloaded as a pdf "Adobe Acrobat Reader" file by clicking on the link which follows: Virtual Designs |