Surrealistic Photomontage with Photoshop By Carlos Jimenez Varela

Creating worlds that only exist in your imagination is possible with Adobe Photoshop. Carlos Jiménez – designer and publicist – has more than 20 years expressing his ideas in Photoshop, a tool that fascinates him by the possibilities he offers to visualize his ideas (after pencil and paper). His passion is surrealist digital photomontage, where he seeks to transcend reality and model it at will to achieve incredible compositions with realistic finishes.

In this course you will learn to develop your creativity and your photomontage skills through the execution of surreal ideas. You will develop an idea from beginning to end, covering the entire production and postproduction process of Carlos.

You will meet Carlos Jiménez who will tell you about his training as a graphic designer, his 15-year professional career as a creative director in advertising agencies and how he managed to specialize in his passion: surrealist photomontage. In addition, you will see its main influences between the different styles of surrealism from classical to modern exponents.

Carlos will teach you different systems for generating ideas. Next, you will see the different criteria to make a preliminary photo selection and then make a digital draft that will help you make decisions about composition, perspective, and what works best.

You will perform photographic preproduction. You will see the equipment, materials and props you need to develop the production of your set. Once you have everything, you will see some considerations to make your photo session and you will discuss basic lighting techniques that will be very useful. Then, you will make preliminary cuts to create a separate assembly with elements to facilitate the integration of the final piece.

Then you will work the final assembly. You will ambulate the background, correcting the distortion of the base photograph and retouching and / or expanding the ground and sky to give it more personality. You will integrate the elements based on the assembly made previously, and you will make sure of the colors. Next, you will work the lights and shadows of each of the elements.

Carlos will give you a series of tips to finish your piece correctly. Thus, you will correct details, perform the colorization to homogenize the photomontage and apply textures to some of the elements.

At the end of the course you will have learned different techniques to stimulate your creativity and make it a reality through photographic and photo montage production processes.

You will carry out a project of digital surrealist photomontage.