Project 2. Overgrown Gardens I have a great neighbor. We help each other out, and he was the first guy I met when we moved into our crescent. The only thing about my neighbor is his perfect yard. I won't compare him to Hank Hill, but his lawn and yard are pretty darn closemuch closer than my own yard.  At the same time, we have a couple other neighbors who have prize-winning gardens. One of them, though, is wild looking and filled with great colorful flowers, some of them quite exotic (at least for our clime). There has also been some recent water main trouble and the machines were just in here digging up the pavement. Sounds like a great combination for some photo fakery fun. 1. | To get started, I'll open the photo of my neighbor's house along with a couple of the houses with the water trouble and the garden (there's two of them). You can see all three images (Neighbor House 1.tif, Neighbor House 2a.tif, and Neighbor House 2b.tif) in Figure 8.8.
Figure 8.8. Three photos to be combined. 
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Fixing the Driveway The first thing I want to do is replace that great driveway. It's actually 25 years old, but it looks better than most of the driveways in the neighborhood. 2. | To replace the driveway, activate the image with the road showing. It's the one with the yellow barrier to the left.
| 3. | Use the Freehand Selection tool with the Selection type set to Point to Point to select an area of the road where it's all messed up from the work. Figure 8.9 shows the selection I made. With the pavement selected, choose Edit, Copy.
Figure 8.9. Selecting some torn-up pavement. 
| 4. | Activate the image with the house that we're fixing, and select Edit, Paste As New Layer. This places the selected section of road directly above the image of the house.
Move the new driveway into place over the old one (see Figure 8.10). Be sure it covers the old driveway.
Figure 8.10. Moving the new driveway into place. 
| 5. | Toggle off the visibility of the new driveway layer. To do so, click the small Eye icon next to the layer in the Layers palette.
| 6. | Use the Freehand Selection tool to make a rough selection of the existing driveway.
| 7. | Toggle the new driveway layer's visibility back on and activate the layer.
| 8. | From the Layer palette's pull-down menu, select New Mask Layer, Show Selection. What just happened is that a mask was built from the selected old driveway. That mask is what's letting the old, torn-up road show throughbut only where the old driveway was (see Figure 8.11). This is a good thing because we can adjust the mask as necessary to get the pavement to really assume the place of the old driveway.
Figure 8.11. The new driveway masked and in place. 
The driveway looks pretty good from here, but zooming in will reveal some places where the mask needs to be bent and twisted into shape. We'll worry about that later, though.
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Adding a New Garbage Can From the other photo, the one with the barrier on the right, I want a couple of things: I want to clone some of the plants into the photo we're changing, and I want that garbage can that's over on its side. I think it'll make a great addition to the makeover. Tip Placing the garbage can worked well in this project because the two images shared a common setting: The sun was in the same place, the photos where taken at the same time of day, and so on. This won't always be the case, and you'll have to pay attention to things like shadows. One misplaced shadow can spoil the whole effect and make the resulting photo unbelievable.
9. | Using the Freehand Selection tool, draw a selection around the garbage can. Make sure you grab its shadow. Select Edit, Copy, and then activate the main image (the one we're changing, that is) and select Edit, Paste As New Layer.
| 10. | Move the garbage can into place and then zoom in and remove any extra material using the Eraser tool. You can see my result in Figure 8.12. Note that I also rotated the can a little to the right to get it to look as though it belonged there.
Figure 8.12. Dropping a new garbage can into place. 
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Time for Some Gardening It's time to do a little gardening. We'll use the Clone Brush to copy the wild plants from one image to another. 11. | Activate the image with the plants to be copied. I used the image with the barrier on the right because the plants seemed to match up well in size to the existing hedges we'll be covering.
| 12. | Select the Clone Brush and right-click in the image over the plants. I set the brush size large enough to cover the plants I wanted to copyabout 280 pixels.
| 13. | With the Clone Brush still active, click and drag in the image we're working on. This paints the wild flowers over the existing hedges (see Figure 8.13).
Figure 8.13. Adding some wild flowers. 
| 14. | Finally, go back and paint into the mask a little to let more of the boat trailer and its wheels show through the mask. Note that the mask is grayscale, but we'll need to use only black and white. Where the mask is white the new driveway (the old wrecked bit of pavement) will show through and cover the old driveway. Where the mask is black the underlying photo will show through. That means I added a little black using the Paint Brush tool to get the rest of the trailer to show through. My final image is shown in Figure 8.14.
Figure 8.14. My neighbor's house. 
There's more that could be done to this image. If the lighting were right, for example, I'd take the shutters and set them askew; I might darken things a little and change the bright blue sky to something a little more dismal. Before you know it, I'd be living next to the Addams Family.
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