Peace...in our time?

I hope people don't think I'm being cynical or making a joke about peace with this artwork. I just find it hard to believe that with our history of warfare, that mankind will ever achieve peace for long. I still think it's a worthwhile aspiration though.

This is my first digital collage. Well, the first I've actually finished. I've started others before, but never finished them because they just weren't working out. The Photoshop Support Group on Flickr has taught me a lot recently though. I now realize you need to know more than just layers and opacity to get a digital collage working.....

It may seem presumptious to be offering tips at this early stage, but in case anyone else is stuck making a start on digital collages, here's some of what was useful to me today:

1. I made heavy use of the magic wand to remove unwanted background - even if you don't get it in one go, it's still really fast.
2. I took frequent snapshots so I could easily revert to earlier versions. This meant I could merge layers and get rid of that annoying checkerboard effect.
3. Rather than relying on the opacity control, I worked with the adjustment layers.
4. I found a warming photo filter helped bring out the helicopters from the background.
5. I created lots of layers and played with different effects to really work each area of the image.

There are still a few things I would like to change but it requires going too far back. If I was going to use this image for anything else I would like to tighten up the composition and crop a little.

For the images, I mostly relied on online government sources, and believe they are all in the public domain. I discovered the US National Archives is a great source of images for this type of project and most are in the public domain.The image of helicopters were sourced here - http://tinyurl.com/ymrz8o. I was unable to find any information on the original copyright owner.


If I have breached copyright at all, this is completely unintentional. This artwork will not be used for any other purpose than as an entry in IF. If you are a copyright holder and request your image be removed, it will immediately be done.