Compositing Process

I used Adobe Photoshop for this project because of its efficiency with single frame timelined compositing approach. (Although, for further editing of the images, a node bases structure could be better- not as much data is lost.)
First, I had to find images with the right camera angle and lighting. After that I had to cut the primary images and project them over the background images. To manage the hierarchy I used the Layers window. 

Much of the work needed to make the image's edges match up composed of using the erase, move, blur, dodge, burn, and marquee select tools. Move tool: to position the images. Dodge tool: to lighten areas of the image. Burn tool: to darken edges of the image and apply shadows. The blur tool was very helpful to blur the edges of the images so that they wouldn't look too sharp -helping it blend in. The image to the upper left shows how I used the marquee tool to select the duck's feet and copy/duplicate them. I flipped the duplication, lowered the opacity and blurred the image to look like the ducks reflection.

One rule of thumb for me is to always do as much color correcting as I can before I convert the images into greyscale. This blends the images up nicely before we loose their color data. Before I converted the images to greyscale, I color corrected the color intensity and contrast of the images to match using the Levels and Brightness/Contrast features shown below. I then matched up the lesser quality (pixelated) images to the cleaner ones by using the film grain artistic filter.