Stock Images in Collages
Ever since Touchstone first nudged me towards using stock images in my Photoshop creations a little less than 2 years ago, I've become more and more dependent on them. And I don't recall ever seeing a tutorial about how to use them, so I thought, well, that's were I come in. So onwards with my usual rambling discussion/confessional-style tutorial! It should be applicable to just about any decent image editing program...
12.1 - What's a Stock Image?
So what exactly do I mean by "stock image"? Given that a picture's worth a thousand words, let's cut right to the chase; here're 12 examples of stock images:
So yeah, that's right. By stock image, I mean pretty much *any* image of *anything*. They certainly don't have to be square, like my examples above. They can be close up or distant landscape or anywhere in between. They can be black and white, full color, or tinted and in any format your editing program can handle. You can take them yourself with a digital camera, or scan in from traditional photos you've printed. You can scan them in from books/magazines/calendars/postcards or even scan flat-sided physical objects. You can find them everywhere on the web (though, try to respect peoples' ownership!) or you can even outright buy a legitimate collection -- I use the Big Box of Art, hereafter known as BBoA. If you're working with caps, especially if you're making your own, you can make/use caps showing different parts of the set as stock images. (see below for more help with hunting)
So what's so great about stock images? See, the thing is, though there are exceptions, as a general rule, a collage consisting of just peoples' faces is at best boring and at worst an assault on the senses (see Collage Redux for long-winded ramblings on that subject). The faces may be the focal point, but you need background, you need color, you need texture, you need rhythm and balance, you need elements to establish mood and to tie different images together, you need !notPeople in between the People. And that's were stock images come in.
If you're already using custom brushes, you'll notice that using stock images is very similar. If you're using a custom brush to just stamp once somewhere, that's exactly like using a grayscale stock image. If you're stamping multiple times, that's like using multiple copies of that stock image. The main difference is that the stock image can be in color, whereas the custom brush is going to be a single color or shades of a single color. You can however *make* the stock image a single color using the hue-saturation command. You can even define a stock image as a brush if that's what you're comfortable with.
12.2 - Finished example please?
Here's a quick one, a text-less version of one of my first successful attempts to use stock images:
No fandom images at all here, but still visually interesting because of the combination of stock pics. Now below you'll see cropped samples of the images I used to create it, in their original colors. The image of the flower is actually a photo I took of a plant I grew on my balcony. The rest are from either the BBoA or Gettyone.com.
12.3 - Working through an example -- Casablanca
Okay, first we'll start with a simple black and white example. Here's a very simple collage in which I've very quickly and roughly blended together two pictures from the movie Casablanca (for help blending, see my Blending Tutorials; for caps from the movie, see my Casablanca site)
So first, I'm going to fill in some color by using a stock image. So I go looking for a nicely colored image with a little variation in tone, but not much detail. And I find this:
I paste it in a new layer above the original collage, and I stretch it out using the edit->transform (control-T) command in photoshop, so that the sun is no longer on the canvas, and so that it covers everything. Then I start trying different blend modes for that layer (screen, overlay, softlight, etc) and sometimes fiddling with the opacity of the layer blend until I find settings I like. In this case, I ended up with Hard Light @ 60% opacity. I also add an adjustment layer of levels, boosting the contrast. Giving me:
If you've never used blend modes before, they can be accessed via the layers palette. There'll be a drop menu at the top, defaulted to "Normal". Make sure the layer you want to mess with is selected, and then select different items from that menu.
Okay, next step, I'll introduce a little texture. So I go looking for a closeup of something with some sort of gritty feel to it, and find this:
And the fiddling begins anew. I copy the stock image to the clipboard, paste it into the collage file (which automatically adds it as a new layer above the collage, and makes it the active layer), move it around/ resize until it covers my entire canvas and then start fiddling with the blend mode and opacity until I like what I see. Which on this particular afternoon ended up being Soft Light, 87% opacity.
Okay, one more I think! I'm not 100% happy with the roughness of the blend between the two caps (it's obvious where one picture ends and the other begins), so I'd like to introduce something to distract from that. So I find an image with a more complex look to it, and since some of it will be recognizable, I try to pick something that can pass for local Casablancan color.
Using this image is going to be a bit trickier than the last two, because for best results, I'm going to have to erase bits and pieces of it, and that erase needs to be very feathered so that it blends well. I highly recommend this be done via layer masks. If you insist, you can however use the eraser tool, or a feathered lasso (then invert and delete). Anyway, the basic procedure is the same as above: you paste the new image in, you fiddle with the layer blend and opacity. But in this case, there's an extra last step where you go back and fade out the details over faces and other areas where you want details from the original collage to shine through. I also decided to rearrange the order of the layers, because I thought this one looked best underneath the color and texture layers. Doing so and setting the layer to Screen, 57% opacity, gave me:
See how the arches now tether the two images together, make them more like they belong together? This finishes the job of tying everything together -- making it look like one image -- that I started by applying similar color and texture over all the parts. Since both images were very similar in coloring, this wasn't as necessary in this case, but if you're using images that are clearly from different sources, this tying-together process can go a long way towards making a *finished* looking finished piece. Notice also that I didn't have to take forever carefully cutting out the individual characters, because the original backgrounds got blended in with the new background.
So anyway, this isn't a work of art by any means, but hopefully enough to give you an idea of the potential of stock images, for texture, for color and for making random pieces seem like part of a coherent whole.
12.4 - A second example -- Gattaca
Because I really do plan on capping this movie entirely any day now and just have a blissful collage fest, I thought I'd get the tippy end of my toes wet by using a few images in another example similar to the one above. So let's start with a basic blend of 3 images:
So now I go browsing through my stock images, and something with some really subtle lighting catches my eye. I think it's a slightly blurred picture of a beach with palm trees reflecting in some water. But I could be wrong. At any rate, it's pretty:
So I go ahead and add it to my collage. A little experimentation leaves me with overlay at 100%. I mask out a few stray bits over Ethan Hawke's face, but leave the trailing sparkles over Uma Therman's dark jacket.
I could very well stop right there -- sometimes knowing when to stop fiddling is the hardest thing -- but this is a tutorial, so let's see what else we can experiment with. So I paw through the collection again, and this time come up with some architecture. If I were doing this for real, I'd probably use caps of architecture from the movie for maximum authentic ambiance, but we'll just cheat a little here and use some modern looking office buildings:
More experimentation, and I end up with Soft Light at 32% for a really subtle effect. I also mask out some bits that I don't like because they interfere too strongly with my main figures. Don't forget that you don't have to use the *entire* image. You can resize it, hide bits and pieces of it, etc; nor does any one stock image have to cover your entire canvas.
Finally, just one more touch of subtle variation:
Great gritty sand texture, muted colors, graceful bent grass, looks like a prime candidate for our mix of stocks. I end up adding at Overlay, 43% opacity, with some of the central stalk masked out:
12.5 - General Types
So what have we learned so far? Hopefully that stock images are easy to use and really helpful in pulling everything together into a satisfying whole. So now that we've seen them in action, let's step back a bit and talk generalities. Though there's typically a lot of cross over, these are the main types of Stock Images by purpose as I see it:
COLORING/LIGHTING
These are stock images used to change the color of your collage, and/or to add sparks or areas of light. Any image with relatively bright spots or washes of color will work for this purpose.
starting with:
combined with 3 example stock images:
In the first example, I'm using an image of a subway to add streaks of light emphasizing the direction Carter and Daniel are looking. Don't forget you can rotate/flip a stock if light streaks aren't going in the direction you want!
In the second example, I blur the cloud images slightly so that the cloud forms are no longer visible, and just use the image for straight coloring. Blurring or otherwise filtering stocks and/or using the Hue/Saturation command to change its color is a great way to get a million and one uses out of the same stock image.
In the final example, I use a black and white image set to screen (and then colorized) to add discrete specks of light. So in addition to changing colored stock images to other colors, don't forget you can colorize black and white images (using the Hue/Saturation tool, or by combining them with colored stock images)
Screen is the blending mode I use most often with these sort of stocks, but others such as soft light, hard light & color frequently work well too.
TEXTURE
These stocks add an overall pattern, usually a rather fine-detailed, sometimes subtle, sometimes rough. They tend to look like flat surfaces (paper, rocks, cement, metal, etc)
starting with:
combined with 3 example stock images:
Texture stocks are probably the most straightforward in use. You just pick a texture (in the examples, canvas, cardboard and rock) and experiment with the blends. I typically decrease the opacity of the stock layer the rougher the texture is, so as not to overwhelm the underlying image, but that's by no means a hard and fast rule. Maybe you *want* to make the character image difficult to see, if that's part of your piece's concept (see Collage Redux for a discussion of concepts in fanart). Softlight and Overlay are the modes I use most with textures, though depending on the colors involved and where you going with it, others will work just fine too. Notice that you typically can't just add texture without changing the color and/or brightness quite a bit as well.
ICONOGRAPHY
These are pictures of things you intend to still be recognizable in the final project. They would normally be objects that you are using because they fit in thematically/symbolically, or as a background setting, ie a gravestone when doing a piece about a character's death.
starting with:
combined with 3 example stock images:
Iconic stocks are the most likely kind to be used with the normal blend mode, though others, such as screen and overlay are also common. You almost always need to mask/blend out the edges, as you'll probably not be covering the entire canvas with the images. Notice that one of my stock images is actually another screen cap from a different part of the episode. Shots of the settings and backgrounds and landscapes kindly provided for you by the show's creators make *excellent* stock images to integrate with images of the characters themselves. Can't get more authentic and perfectly matching than those!
Of course, these 3 categories are rather fluid. Sometimes, the same images can be used for lighting, texture or iconography, depending on the blend mode, opacity placement and/or underlying colors, perhaps even in the same piece!
12.6 - Deciding What to Use
The biggest problem with stock images is that your choices are literally unlimited. You could do a million different things with the same set of 15 images. Or you could find 20 new ones for every piece you make, and still never run out. So how do you decide?
Well, for me, I start with my local collection. I have a folder on my harddrive, which I've subdivided into "textures", "manmade" and "nature". Each has tons of sub-folders. Whenever I come across an image I like, I save it to an appropriate subfolder. Textures for images of flat surfaces (natural or manmade). Manmade for images of cities, architecture, objects, factories, etc. Natural for sea, sky, landscapes, etc. Then I'll occassionally go for a browse, and if a particular image strikes me, I'll take it into photoshop, see where it takes me. And sometimes it works the opposite way; I've made the scaffolding of the collage in photoshop, and then I go browsing through the stock images I have saved to see what resonates with what I've got so far.
And then sometimes I have a theme in mind first, and then I go searching for images I know I don't have yet to fill it out. For example, I got the idea to do a Fred/Spike collage (before s5 AtS, I'll have you know!) and I wanted to use that old song "she blinded me with science", which made me think of something techy, so I did a search for "circuit" on gettyone.com, and came up with a million different possibilities. Or when I wanted to do my "caged tiger" collage, I knew I needed a tiger, so I went looking for that. That's how the collection on the old harddrive grows. You search for something specific, you find 20 images that are not quite right, but you save them for later, just in case, and before you know it, you've got a couple of hundred megs of jpegs taking up space. ::cue ominous voice:: it'll happen to you!
Essentially, there are no rules about what to use and where, whether to do the collage first and then go looking for supporting stocks, or vice versa. It's a game of instinct, and largely, luck. You pick an image, you plunk it down, you play with blending modes and placement a while, and then you decide, "in or out?". Either way, chances are you go looking for another, try that one out, see what happens. See why it takes me so long to make a collage?
The general rule of thumb is the same as with the addition of any image to the mix; after each new one, you ask yourself: is this better because I've added this image? What purpose does the new addition serve? Maybe a bit of rough texture adds to the harsh mood you're going for. Maybe a dash of light here counter balances a face over there. Maybe this object looks like an object in a scene you're illustrating, but couldn't get a good capture of. Sometimes you can get lucky just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. That's mostly what I do. But you have to make sure that after the fact at least, you can come up with a reason for why it works. Otherwise, maybe it *doesn't*, and your piece would be stronger without it.
12.7 - Finished Piece Commentary
And now, I'll pick a few random pieces I've used stock images in, and show you some of the images that went in and why...
Ciphers
Ciphers started with some caps of Lindsey and Eve which caught my eye mainly because of the coloring and atmosphere.
I really liked the window framing them in the original image, but there wasn't quite enough of it, so I went looking for a similar stock image to use. Later, I wanted a bit of counter-balance to all the straight lines, so I found the shot looking up into a domed ceiling.
Containment
I thought this image nicely summed up where Angel is this season, so I built from that sense of being hemmed in by selecting a stock image of a cave.
Then I just drifted around pulling things in more based on aesthetics than deliberate symbolism, including some dead leaves, a city landscape, condensation on a window.
Primitive
For this, I didn't have any other idea but that this should be rough and texture-filled as possible, to suggest a cave-painting.
So I pulled in a lot of stock images with rough texture to them, like grainy paper, rocks, etc.
Mustang
Sometimes, you don't even need a fandom to have fun with stock images. I had just visited my brother and taken a few pictures of his spiffy car, and back home in the rainy east, found myself missing the desert, where I grew up, so I went looking for some images.
Liked this set so much, I ended up using them to do a site design too. That's the nice thing about stocks, depending what colors and other effects you use, you can recyle a lot of the same images over and over without feeling like you're repeating yourself.
Ahab
Having already made the mental connection between Holtz' relentless pursuit of Angel and Captain Ahab's similarly self-destructive persuit of the White Whale, going looking for nautical images to support the piece was a no-brainer.
Among others, I used a distant lighthouse to anchor the upper left corner, lightening to emphasize the danger and imminent disaster, choppy seas, ditto, and even a painting by Turner, also happening to be of the sea, to add some rough texture.
12.8 - Gimmee, Gimmee, Where Do I find Stock Images?
Where do you get 'em? Why everywhere, naturally. But here's the basic breakdown:
YOUR OWN BACK YARD
Have a digital camera? Or a scanner? Then you're all set. Closeups of things around your house, scenery outside, scans of papers, books, magazines, it's enough to keep you busy for ever. This is in some way the best source, because no one can reproach you with copyright issues (well except for books/magazine-scanning!) and because it's bound to be unique stuff that no one else has.
BUY YOUR WAY TO HAPPINESS
You can also buy what are known as "royalty free" collections. Most clipart collections have photos as well, and most can be bought for relatively cheap. And once you've bought them, they're yours to do as you wish with. I haven't *seen* let alone used 1% of the ones I bought 2 years ago, so I'll rec that set if you don't want to do a lot of research to find the right collection for you. Big Box of Art @ Amazon.
TROLL THE 'NET
The net is of course filled with images, mostly there for the taking with a simple right click. Gettyone.com is a favorite. Do try to be considerate of peoples' ownership of images. If a site specifically asks that images not be chopped up and recycled into other images, keep your karma clean and oblige. Especially don't use peoples' personal digital photos without their permission. It's tacky.
YOUR CAPTURES, OR SOMEONE ELSES'
Most on-line collections of caps (see my list) don't spare a lot of attention to backgrounds and set pieces, so your best bet is to make your own. If you have a DVD-drive and DVDs of the show, you're golden; just pop in the DVD and then use PowerDVD or similar software to capture images. Otherwise, you'll have to find an AVI or MPEG of the episode, and then use a program like vdub to capture frames.
12.9 - Time to Play
Stock images, easy to find. But just in case you're so ready to go you want to jump right in without going hunting first, I've put together a little starter set to practice with. Just click on the thumbnails below to download the zip file (1.39 MB). Here's what you get:
And using this collection, here are 3 examples I whipped together. See what you can come up with! (hint: click on the images below to download a zip file containing a layered PSD for each collage. Try rearranging the order of the layers, changing the blend modes and opacities, moving things around, etc.)
Don't forget to try:
|
Welcome to the stock image addiction... Hope your hard drive can handle it!