Put a person's head on another person's body, or put a person where he or she doesn't belong.
A couple of years ago, I received this picture in an E-mail. It's fake, but it's supposed to be President Bush and his father fishing while people suffer during Hurricane Katrina. (this image from http://themaclellans.com):
Here's another one, created just after Hillary Clinton declared her intention to run for President (from freakingnews.com):
Although these are political examples, this technique is used commercially, and is a good exercise. I would like you to make something similar to the above photographs--your choice of person and body or person and place.
I am not suggesting that you make a picture that is disrespectful to anybody (especially a president); I'm just showing you these as an example of photos that were obviously manipulated with Photoshop.
These are done very simply--heads (or bodies) are selected, then copied-and-pasted to another image. However, the people who made them spent a lot of time making them look nice by choosing good original photos, cutting them out carefully, and paying attention to what the edges looked like afterward. I want you to take the time to make yours look nice, too. Try to make it look this good.
Hints:
1. I would go to Yahoo, click on the "images" tab, and search for the people or backgrounds that I wanted.
2. I would use the largest pictures available to start with so that the quality will be good (small pictures will end up looking grainy or blocky).
3. When you're cutting out your heads or bodies to paste on the other picture, try using the magnetic lasso tool (looks like this
) to select the boundaries. It makes tracing around a picture much easier.
4. Keep the original pictures so that you can show me what changes you made.
Your choice of people and backgrounds. Make it look nice!