The HAUNTED LIBRARY! Boo!

This, my gentle reader, is the picture that I think expresses how much I love the magic of Photoshop. This photo is called “Haunting Memories”.

I started off with as basic and empty picture of a library I could find (which was actually kind of hard!). The picture was a little on the light side for me, so I heighted the contrast, and then fixed the lighting levels so that the “highlights” were darker. From there I decided to add a very light, white gradient to the top of the picture, which added a surreal look to the place (at least, in my opinion it did). Then, it was time to add the people. The first steps were same for all the people, trace the outside edge of the people with the “Magic Lasso” and delete everything BUT the people, then use the eraser to clean up the edges, and copy and paste the person onto the library. Once there, I adjusted their size to fit the perspective (the people on the top floor were also skewed a little to fit the angle of the original shot of the library) and then I adjusted their opacity. This is what made them look like ghosts. From there I did a simple clean up of the photos (The people on the balcony had their mid-sections erased so they looked like they were behind the banister, and the two women in the center were partially erased for the same effect, only with a table.)

I wanted this photo to be very similar to the “party scene” on the Haunted Mansion ride in Disneyland. Since I was recently there, the image was seared into my mind, and had a great influence over the final product. But, I also wanted to go deeper than that. Each of the black and white photos is from a different era (Victorian, 1900’s, 1920’s, 1930’s and 1950’s to be exact) like a stockpile of memories. I wanted it to seem like things had happened in that library, and here were the people to explain why it was important to them. Some of them notice the “onlooker” (which is you at the moment!) while others are wrapped up in their memories. Do I know their stories? No, but I would like to. It would be interesting to be in a circumstance like that. Paranormal, Right? Awesome, Correct? Yes. And it just goes to show that a little imagination and Photoshop can go a very long way.

-Babs