Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

Laura Dong
CSE455 Computer Vision
Project 1 Artifact

Original Images | Mask Images | Final Image

Original Images

The inspiration (found on Wikipedia and cited by just about everyone):

I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.

The subjects: Nikola Tesla, a pigeon, and the hands of a guy called Mike Tyson who also happens to be a fan of pigeons. I will refer to the second image as "pigeon hands".

Tesla PigeonHands

And a pretty background.

South Bass Park

Masks made with iScissor

The mask used to paste Tesla into a more interesting background.

Masks used on the pigeon hands. The first mask cuts the pigeon with the hands. The second mask isolates the hands from the rest of the image for additional manipulation.

Final Image

Photoshop procedure:

  1. I used the Tesla portrait as the basis for the overall composition, so I first converted the other two images to grayscale.
  2. Pigeon hands.
    Using the partial mask, I selected the hands (via "Magic Wand" tool) and adjusted the intensity levels to match the levels on Tesla's portrait. I also adjusted the levels of the overall image to darken the whites and lighten the blacks, and applied filters to add some blur and grainy effects. I used the full mask to cut the pigeon and hands from the image.
  3. Tesla.
    Similarly to the previous image, I used the iScissor's mask to cut and also paste Tesla onto the background.
  4. The park.
    With Tesla pasted in the background, I scaled this down, relative to the size of the pigeon hands cut-out (the smallest-sized image), until I had somewhat believable proportions. Once the pigeon hands were pasted in, I applied a warming filter to the image.