Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [38]
STEP 10:
This works great, but it does leave us with a problem: the Inner Glow effect is applied around the entire layer. Even the man on the right has a dark edge around him now (you may need to turn off the black background layer to really see it). So, go to Layer>Layer Style>Create Layer. This puts the effect onto its own layer, so it’s no longer a layer style.
STEP 11:
Click the layer style’s layer to make it active, and then click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. Select the Brush tool, and set your Foreground color to black. Then, paint away the inner glow from any areas you don’t want it to affect.
STEP 12:
Turn the black background layer back on. If you still see a white fringe, now is a good time to try the Defringe feature. Click once on the layer with the family to target it. Go to Layer>Matting>Defringe, enter 1 pixel for the Width setting and click OK. The selection edge should be looking really good now, especially around her hair. And since she’s going to be standing in front of someone with a dark jacket, we need it to look really convincing. Go to File>Save and save it as a PSD file. Then, using the same selection techniques we used here, select the families from the other two photos. In fact, I thought they were a little easier, since the hair seemed to select better from both of them.
Creating the Composite
The more compositing you do, the more you’ll find that sometimes you spend more time on the composite and sometimes you spend more time on the setup. I think this composite is a perfect example of one where you spend more time on the setup. Since everything was photographed at the same distance and same focal length on the camera, putting this composite together is probably the easiest part of the project. The main thing we’ll need to do in Photoshop is make sure we place the shadows correctly whenever we put one person in front of another.
STEP ONE:
There is no background photo in this one. Instead, we’re going to use a white background. So, go to File>New and create a new image that’s 5600×2800 pixels at 240 ppi, and make sure the Background Contents pop-up menu is set to White. Where’d I get those numbers from? Well, if you open one of the portraits in Photoshop and go to Image>Image Size, you’ll see the height is about 2800 pixels. So, we know the overall height of the final image won’t exceed that. Then, I just doubled it for the width, since I knew 5600 pixels would be plenty wide enough. We can always crop later.
STEP TWO:
Now, open the three photos with the people already selected from the background. Each family should be on its own layer if you followed the previous tutorial (if you have a layer style as a layer, like we did in the previous tutorial, turn off the other layers below the selected family, and press Command-Option-Shift-E [PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E] to merge them into a new layer at the top of the layer stack). Use the Move tool (V) to drag them onto your new background image, so they’re all in the same document. Make sure you place the couple’s layer below the other families’ layers, since they’ll go in the middle, behind everyone else.
STEP THREE:
We know the perspective is right on because of the way we photographed everyone, and everyone is at their correct height. But when you get them together like this and start moving people around, you sometimes lose one person’s height relative to another. One thing I found that helps is to make