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Creating Montage Background Scenes-Odessa, TX

Creating Montage Background Scenes by Philippe Coquet

ODESSA, TX - in progress

For my latest display Odessa TX, I would have liked visiting the original place and capturing the ‘real’ town. Unfortunately, I have never been in this region of Texas that I decided to model. Instead, I used some pictures taken by a friend of mine in El Paso (large factory on the left) Cheyenne WY and Trinidad NM (brick structures on the right). -- Philippe

The photo above shows just the model looks like without a backdrop. This is the layer that has been created by assembling 3 pictures of the display

 

This second photo above shows how the background looks like alone with no building models.

 

Finally the third photo, shown above, demonstrate how both forefront & background look like when assembled.

 

Comments on the images displayed on these pages:

The project being over, and with some ‘milage’ in using Photoshop, I found interesting and amusing to share with you the real look and feel of the finished layout modules (Odessa TX is still work in progress with a lot of street details, utility lines, signage, street light system… still to be modeled), mixing real models and virtual photo-montages.

- 1st image of each of the series is the model ‘on its own’, without any backdrop. For creating these images, I took a series of 3 pictures of each of the modules, walking perpendicular to the layout sections. I then assembled them and cropped the final image to keep only the layout and its structures (shooting the modules with a plain white background helps making the cropping much less time consuming).
- 2nd image of each of the series is the backdrop “on its own”, purely virtual, straight from the Photoshop software on the PC.
- 3rd image is simply the superimposition of the two first images, providing thus with a very accurate idea of what the final modules look like, when adding the backdrop, as if the picture would have been shot from some distance.

I hope you will agree with me that it makes quite a difference!

 

Edited by Craig S. O'Connell / Photos and text by Philippe Coquet

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