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What do a flamingo, a baby, a yellow car, a horse, a supermarket aisle, and Mt. Rushmore have in common?
Aside from being the setup to a cheesy joke, they're all images used by the winners of Pop Photo's fourth annual Digital Wizard Contest.
Our rules were simple: Turn out a masterpiece by combining, manipulating, and/or enhancing elements from at least four of the 12 not-sogreat images at left. Use only tools that are in your image-editing software; adding other pictures is forbidden.
Picked as the best from among nearly 500 entries, the five winners shown on these pages demonstrate technical ability, creative vision, and, in more than one case, a pretty good sense of humor.
$1,000 Grand Prize Winner
This modern-day Pinocchio, shown above right, wasn't made in a toyshop but in Adobe Photoshop CS2, by 28-year-old Alison Davis of Central Lake, MI. A graphic designer and mother, Davis immediately saw the puppet-theater potential in the photos.
She combined filters to turn the baby's face into a wooden one, bloated the eyes with the Liquify tool and used Transform's Warp function to give him more of a smile and raise his eyebrows. She crafted his body using the crates from the grocery store for his arms and legs, and parts of the horse for Pinocchio's donkey ears and tail. The puppet's clothes are fashioned from bits of the textiles in the living room photo and clothing from the picture of the couple. The background is the Roman Forum photo with a Paint filter over it.
"I apologize to the mother of the baby whose eyes I bloated and face I turned to wood," Davis says.
This digital Geppetto spent 16 hours over the course of four days on her project.
$300 1st Prize Winner
Twenty-one-year-old Los Angeles art student Julianne Holzschuh's aspirations to be a video game designer are apparent in this fanciful composite that she spent 25 hours creating in Photoshop CS2. Crafting a Pegasus by using the feathers from the flamingo on the horse was just one of the painstaking steps that Holzschuh went through to design this introspective scene. Other elements she used include one of the girls from the double portrait, pieces of Mt. Rushmore, and the sky from the beach photo.
Her inspiration came from the horse: "I knew I wanted to use the horse, and when I noticed the flamingo, I knew I wanted to make a Pegasus," she says. "I like mythical creatures, so I had a lot of fun with it." Turning what she calls a "dumpy" horse into a sleek Pegasus took a lot more work than she anticipated, as did shifting the girl's proportions and focus.
Holzschuh started her artistic career in more traditional media, drawing through her high school years. But, encouraged by paintings created in Photoshop that she discovered online, she began to teach herself techniques from online tutorials and forums, and later from advanced classes.
She calls her image "Best Seat in the House," which it may be, because to us it looks as if her mysterious subject is poised at the edge of the world.
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