My own composition image.

Here is my compostion image. I have taken a picture that I am very pleased with and i have used photoshop to add two seagulls.

Here are the two images that I started with. I wanted to use the magic wand tool to pick up the seagull but it picked up the colours from the ground as well, so i used the brush tool set to clear to get rid of the background, leaving only the seagull and then did copy and paste to put the seagull onto the background image, i did this twice. I then did ctrl+t to use the transform tool to adjust the size and rotation of the seagulls to make them blend in.

Levels

In Photoshop you can use levels to improve your image, this can be used to correct a photograph that you really like that you feel needs a bit of tweaking to make it perfect.
If a photograph is over exposed/under exposed then you can use the adjustment layer on the layers palette to work with levels to fix it. The Histogram will show you the amounts of light and dark to show you whether you have over/under exposed, from here you can adjust the amount of light or dark by moving the arrows along the bottom of the histogram to make the image look a bit better.
You can use the magic wand tool to select different sections of the image, if you have done this correctly you will see the marching ants around the area you selected, from here you can repeat the process to work it on a smaller section of the photograph.

You can also use the levels pallette to adjust hue/saturation, this will make colours on the image look better. By increasing saturation, you will fill the pixels with a much denser colour, making it possibly fuller, however it is a way of exposing weak detail in a photograph. By decreasing saturation you can make the image seem more grainy or if done correctly can give the image a sense of a coloured wash.

If your photograph has a lead-in line, it can be made to give the image more impact by using the hue/saturation tool to make it stand out more, a dusty road for example can be made more impactful by giving it a deeper tone, this can be done in hue/saturation or by adjusting the area's tonal range.

Contrast is also a good way of improving an image, you can make lighter colours blend or clash by adjusting the contrast. This can make things like greens and oranges have a greater, fuller effect in creating the difference between a simplistic and an artist photograph.

Cropping Tool

In Adobe Photoshop you can use the cropping tool for a multitude of reasons. The primary reason for cropping an image is to get ride of any unwanted details of a photograph or to take away an actual section, perhaps from a side or the top etc. By cropping an image, you can remove things like someone's head in the corner of the screen as they walked past you.

When using the cropping tool you need to bare in mind the shape and size of the image that you are finishing with. If you are cropping a whole image then you need to think about whether your image is going to be printed the correct size and shape for what you are working with. If you start with an image that would print 6"X4" and you crop a bit off, if you do not do so evenly then printing on that size paper would mean a section of print is unused. This may not be the effect you desire and could ruin an image, thus thought is required in this process.

You can also use the cropping tool for compositing images, you may not want to put the whole of a photo onto another one, you may just want a small section of it, so the cropping tool will help you to use the right section and create a better result for you.

Photomontage

Photomontage is the art of having a photograph made of more than one image. There are various methods of doing so. Digitally these are more common in the 21st century, they are simple to create yet take great skill to give the impression desired of the top artist.
Some people will just use a photo editing programme to lay lots of images together.
Some people will physically make a collage of images and take a photo of that.
Others will simply add one or two things to enhance an image, to add something that was not possible when the original shot was taken.
Others will work with a single image and make a collage of it to represent ideas of damage or confusion, depending on how the montage is composed.

You can use photomontage to represent all sorts of things in the media and photographic world. You can simply create collages for magazines. Enhance images for posters, for example to place an artist with a smart car in a nice location. To give a more artist effect, to obtain the viewers gaze and allow for a possible important message to be portrayed.

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler is an American artist who is primarily better celebrated for her work in traditional art than in photography.

In Rosler's photomontage work she is renowned for taking a background and adding lots of things to it that do not belong. Here are two examples, the first one she found her background image and used lots of images of a sportsperson in different positions and then added them to the background to make it look like a display of activity in the location.

The second image is in a plain background and Rosler has added scenery and props, as well as inserted a woman and copied the image of her to make it look like a staggered effect. The image gives the impression of an abstract gallery.

David Hockney

Born in England in 1937, David Hockney is a well known painter, stage designer and photographer among many other trades. He is celebrated for his contribution to the "pop art" movement of the 1960s.

His work in Photocollage often involved using polaroid pictures or small photo-lab prints of a subject and placing them together like a collage to create a bigger image. He called these photographs "joiners".

Hockney liked this work more than what he saw from other photographers of the time, they were using wide-angled lenses which he felt gave a distorted image. Therefore making grid pictures gave a wider picture by using multiple standard pictures to create a clean finished image.

Here you can see the photographers impression of movement in the swimming pool as the multiple pictures cut together make it look like the swimmers are moving around the image.

The second image is lots of pictures of the same area taken and joined together to give a checkered image that represents one jigsaw photo.

Hannah Hoch

Hannah Hoch was a German artist, who lived 1889 to 1978. She was best known as one of the originators of photomontage. Her main themes were same sex couples 1926-35 and women 1963-73. A point that is raised among the majority of her work is that she uses photomontage to point out the faults in beauty culture. She contributed to the feminist Dada movement, being renowned for being able to provide food and water despite a shortage of money.

You can see from the images that she uses a dull colour that is similar to that of old newspapers. This colour appears as a wash across the image. An old feeling is given to the montage as it has the aged quality to it. The second image has empty space around the edges, this gives a feeling of 3D to the image as though the montage stands on top of another layer.