I created this photo montage for a co-op PacSun & Surfline.com Photoshop challenge. Traveling the world for perfect waves is fun, but you needn’t travel far when you live in southern California. I’ve had the good fortune to surf some exotic places on our planet. While warm water is great, there is no place on earth that can better the twenty-one miles of scenic beauty that is Malibu.
This Photoshop project portrays a surfer’s fantasy day on steroids. It remains a personal favorite because I was able to use several original travel photographs, pictures of two surfboards I illustrated myself, and a shot I took of a Zuma Beach, Malibu lifeguard station specifically for this project. I often use this image as my personal Facebook banner.
The challenge itself was quite simple: using at least one of the twelve photographs supplied, make the image(s) better. I used three of the supplied images, three sponsor logos, and a baker’s dozen of my own photographs to complete this composition.
For the Photoshop enthusiasts out there, there were two things I found challenging with this project. The first was creating the donkeys’ shadow. It needed to realistically match the properties of those cast by the lifeguard station in the original photo. The second challenge was illustrating the spray coming off of the breaking wave. The former involved some color matching along with dodge and burn. For the latter I developed an original technique for which I will create a tutorial in the not-too-distant future.
Keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming tutorials section.
Photo Composite ©Ed Ward.
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