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By Root 406 0

I made to the photo, before adding it to the tunnel background. An interesting side note on this image is that I originally thought I’d go with a head-on straight shot of the motorcyclist. In fact, I created the entire composite that way. Then I started working with a photo from a lower angle on the side and as soon as I dropped it onto the background, I knew this was the angle I wanted. It conveyed the idea of speed to me more than the straight shot did. Funny how things work out, huh? Goes to show you it’s worth shooting a few more angles or poses than you think you need. Okay, let’s get started.

STEP ONE:

Here’s a photo of the overall setup for the motorcyclist shoot. The pose isn’t exactly the same one we’re using for this project, but this will give you a good idea of where the lights are positioned. Pretty standard for this edgy type of photo—a strip light on each side (with grids) and one main light in front (along with my buddy RC’s elbow at the top right).

STEP TWO:

Open the photo of the motorcyclist in Camera Raw. Now, I took shots of several different poses—some straight on, some from a lower angle on the side, and some from directly on the side of him (I just had him turn the bike, so his side was facing me). In the end, this one was the one that really caught my eye for a composite. There’s one problem, though: because I changed the shooting angle, the white seamless background isn’t behind him near his helmet on the left. I normally would move the subject, so the backdrop did fall behind them, but that would have meant moving the bike (which wasn’t light) and the lighting setup. Since I was pressed for time, and I knew the edges along the helmet were pretty hard edges, I didn’t worry too much about the selection I’d end up making later.

STEP THREE:

As for the photo, I think there’s a lot of detail in the shadows that we can bring out. So, increase the Fill Light slider to about 60 and you’ll see those shadows open up quite a bit.

STEP FOUR:

There’s not much more we can do in Camera Raw at this point, so let’s move over to Photoshop, however, we’re not locked into these settings. We have a trick for making Photoshop and Camera Raw work together, in case we want to come back and tweak anything (like the overall exposure or white balance of the photo), and trust me, we probably will, once we see the image on the background. Just press-and-hold the Shift key and the Open Image button will turn into the Open Object button (shown circled here). Click it to open this photo in Photoshop as a Smart Object.

STEP FIVE:

Now, let’s start making the selection. First, use the Quick Selection tool (W) to put a selection around the entire motorcyclist. Keep in mind that part of his jacket is gray, as well as the background, so take a few minutes to zoom in and get the selection as good as possible here.

Note: Don’t forget, you can always open the practice files that I’ve provided and they’ll already have a layer with a layer mask of the selected image for you. You can find out where to download them in the book’s introduction.

STEP SIX:

Once your selection looks good, click the Refine Edge button up in the Options Bar. We’re putting the motorcyclist on a fairly dark background, so in the Refine Edge dialog, choose On White from the View pop-up menu—this way, we’ll really see any selection edges that are off. Turn on the Smart Radius checkbox, increase the Radius setting to about 17 pixels, the Smooth setting to 3 (since there aren’t any rough or detailed edges), and the Feather setting to 0.2. Then, in the Output section, from the Output To pop-up menu, choose Layer Mask. If you look closely at the edges around his shoulder, you might see a dirt-like fringe around certain places. This happens a lot when the background color is so close to the edges of what we’re selecting. But we have a trick (that we covered in Chapter 1 and will get to in a minute) to get rid of it using the layer mask, so just click OK here when you’re done.

STEP SEVEN:

Now, in the Layers panel, Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on