Homework 3 Duotone Guess What Are the Stuff in the Front?!

Hi, Everyone: Happy PhotoShopping!!

Here are the two original photos I bought from Fotolia, yes for this homework I did spend quite a few bucks and quite a few hours. Hope you can tell what are the stuff in the front, you know the rectangle stuff in the front. I can NOT tell what they are if I did not done it myslef :-)





Here is how I did it:
1.I spent more than three (maybe five) hours finding the rectangle stuff (solar panels) on Fotolia and lasso them out (I tried at least 5 different images). I finally settled on the above photo as it is kind of the same perspective as the background photo. Still not quite happy with the selection of photo.
2. I mainly use the Polygonal lasso tool to select them, actually my preferred way of doing it is instead of selecting them, I tried to delete the background. I had done at least thousands of selections in the past year, I think the quick selection and magic wand tools are Painful, because they usually get jagged edges and sometimes miss spots later on in the workflow you realize that you missed half of of the finger! I do usually have a solid fill color layer underneath. I also cloned some part of the panel and resized them.
3. I use the CTRL+CLICK in the layer panel to select the png image. Then "selection"--"modify"--"feather" 2 fixel, after that, copy the png into the background image. That really helped blur the edge a little to merge with the sunset image.

4. The background image(sunset) is enlarged (to 960px wide)using smart object filter, I like it better than upsampling. The background image I want it to be a little blur to cause the "field of depth" feeling, so enlarge is not really a problem.
5. I duplicate the solar png layer. I did the color match to get the solar panels have the orange brown tint. (I did not do "invert", it is just too yellowish). Then I reduce its opacity to 50% and blending mode "color" with the original solar png image. Merge those two layers together.

6. I convert both of the images into black and white before I greyscale them. Using "Adjustment"--"black and white", I played with the manual settings a little to get what I think the best contrast black and white of photo.
7. I then used "grey scale" and duotune.