Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [40]
Final Image
7. Studio Sports Portrait
This is probably one of the hottest compositing trends today. A lot of photographers are now choosing to photograph athletes in a studio and then composite them into a background that’s more fitting to their sport, or simply more dramatic. Whether it’s for an advertisement (Nike and Under Armour do it all the time), or whether the athlete just wants a great photo of themselves, shooting this way offers a ton of opportunities. Plus, it makes things a lot easier if you don’t have access to some of the cool locations that you’d ideally like to shoot in.
Prepping the Background
As always, our background is almost as important as the portrait itself. After all, we’re doing all this work so that we can put them into a really cool place, so it’s worth spending some time to set this up. We’ll have to combine a few elements to make this background. First, we’ll need a road that has the correct perspective to it. Since we’ll be including our subject’s feet, this part is really important. Then, we’ll need a city skyline for the background. Throw in some dramatic clouds (I love clouds, if you haven’t realized) and you’re good to go.
STEP ONE:
Open the photo of the road. The first thing we’ll need to do is extend the canvas, since we’ll be adding some buildings and sky to it. You’ll see later that this is sort of a ballpark size for now. It gives us some room to work with, but you can always crop it later if you’d like, depending on the end result. Go to Image>Canvas Size, and in the dialog, make sure the Relative checkbox is turned off, then change the Width and Height unit pop-up menus to Pixels. Let’s keep the Width the same, but increase the Height to 4200. Also, go to the Anchor grid, at the bottom of the dialog, and click the bottom-middle square to keep the road anchored at the bottom of the image and only extend the canvas toward the top. Click OK when you’re done.
©ISTOCKPHOTO/PETKO DANOV
STEP TWO:
Press W to get the Quick Selection tool. Then, brush over the sky and solid area at the top of the image to select it. Don’t worry about refining it with the Refine Edge dialog, because it’s in the background and we’ll never really see any detailed area back there.
STEP THREE:
Open the clouds photo. Go to Edit>Select All to select the entire photo, and then to Edit>Copy to copy it. Switch back over to the background image (where we already have an active selection from the last step), and go to Edit>Paste Special>Paste Into to paste the clouds into the selection. This automatically creates a layer mask, so the clouds only appear in the top of the photo.
STEP FOUR:
Open the photo of the city skyline. Use the Quick Selection tool to select the buildings. Make sure you zoom in and use a smaller brush to get all the tiny edges that the Quick Selection tool probably won’t pick up on the first pass. Remember, you can Option-click (PC: Alt-click) to remove anything it selected that you didn’t want selected. Then, click the Refine Edge button up in the Options Bar. Since there are lots of tiny little details around the edges of the buildings that we’ll want to select, turn on the Smart Radius checkbox, so that Photoshop will look outside of the selected edge for them. Then, set the Radius to 10 pixels, set the Output To setting to Layer Mask, and click OK.
STEP FIVE:
To copy the city photo, we have to use a different command because it has a layer mask with it. So, go to Select>All to select everything, then Edit>Copy Merged to copy the photo. This copies exactly what you see onscreen with the transparent sky. Go back to the background image and Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on the layer mask of the clouds layer to put a selection