For my last design assignment, I did “Wait, where’d that guy come from?” for 3 stars.  My cousin likes to photoshop Gaga into family photos, so I decided to take that idea and expand it to more well-known groupings.  I did this using Paint.NET.

My first step was to find a picture of Gaga, which I accomplished through a simple Google image search.  I chose a big one so that I could edit it in greater detail.  I used Paint.NET’s magic wand tool to select everything non-Gaga in the image, and then deleted my selection.  This technique was not perfect and left some funny looking edges, so I smoothed them out using a combination of the eraser and feathering tools.  Once I had Gaga isolated, I added a new layer to hold the background image.

I decided to use a really big image of a debate, which I found on Wikipedia.  I then resized Gaga to be the same size as all of the politicians.  I also added noise to Gaga’s layer using a built-in tool in Paint.NET.  This made Gaga the same image quality as the background.  I then dragged her over a podium with no visible reflection (it would’ve been very hard to edit the reflection) and got to work erasing her bottom half.  I did this using only the eraser tool.  At this stage I was basically done, except that Gaga didn’t quite cover one of Michele Bachmann’s arms.  The arm looked like this:

I corrected this problem using Paint.NET’s clone stamp tool, which allowed me to duplicate the background right next to the problem arm and effectively cover it up.  I then cropped the image so Gaga was more the focus.