Bible Collage with Verse

This is a project that took years in the making.

Some time ago the family went on a cruise. I'm an early riser, so the background picture was taken at the crack of dawn from one of the upper decks of the ship. That portion remains untouched...nothing was done in Photoshop.

A year or so later in the making of a church project I photographed the Bible on our dining room table. The book was selected out and pasted in as a layer on top of the cruise photo. The pages were distractingly bright, so the Bible was darkened by 20% to go a little better with the background shot.

The project sat on my computer desktop for a while...unbeknownst to me there were bigger and better plans for this thing.

I've been studying the Old Testament and came across a verse that had been taught to me by a co-worker a few years ago...Exodus 14:14. There was such an impact upon seeing it again that I thought it might be worth displaying in the collage that you see in this posting.

The text at first looked very flat, and I couldn't figure out how to find the bevels and shadows controls to show up in Elements 7.0, so decided to create my own effects. A duplicate layer was created for both sizes of text (the passage and scripture citation), and placed beneath each one respectively. The text was left pure white, but the duplicate layers were to become the shadows so they were colored 100% black. To produce the feathered effect on the shadows I gave each a Gaussian blur - seven pixels for the larger text and five pixels for the smaller underneath. Then the shadows were nudged into position diagonally to the text.

The result still wasn't exactly right, so I began to play with the transparency of the white text overlay. The effect was dramatic! After experimenting with lower and higher levels, I settled on 65%.

In the first 10" wide print (which was given to my co-worker) there were some jaggies that came out at the edges of the pages, so that was fixed with the cloning tool. The finished work was saved in layers so that different verses can be inserted. Both photographs were taken with the S7000, so larger prints look good.