Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [55]
Selecting the Samurai
The samurai breaks most of the rules about selections that I’ve talked about so far. Black is probably one of the hardest colors to work with when you have someone with black hair (especially wispy hair, like we have here) and dark details in their clothing (again, like we have here). But, sometimes, we can’t set everything up in the studio like we want, so we have to work with what we’re given.
STEP ONE:
Open the samurai photo. It’s a RAW photo, so it’ll open in the Camera Raw window. First things first, click the Rotate Image 90° Counter Clockwise button in the top toolbar (or just press the L key) to rotate the photo.
STEP TWO:
From a selection standpoint, we know it’s always good to have contrast with the background. Since the background is so dark, move the Fill Light slider up to 30. This’ll brighten it a bit and give us a better chance at a fast, clean selection. Then, press-and-hold the Shift key and click the Open Object button in the bottom right to open the photo as a Smart Object in Photoshop.
STEP THREE:
Use the Quick Selection tool (W) to get a rough outline selection around the samurai. You’ll have to use the Left Bracket key ([) to make the brush really small to grab the sword blade and some of the smaller details. I probably sound like a broken record if you’ve been reading the other tutorials in the book, but it’s definitely worth spending about two minutes now to zoom in and make sure you get all of the smaller details, so you don’t have to go back and do it later. Also, don’t worry about the feet. We’re only going to use the top half of the photo, so you can stop at his knees when selecting.
STEP FOUR:
Click the Refine Edge button in the Options Bar and, when the dialog opens, press B to set the View setting to black. We’re putting him on a dark background, so the darker the preview we have, the better. Set the Radius to 10 and turn on the Smart Radius checkbox, so it helps even the selection around the hair and some of those edges that are harder to see. Use the Refine Radius tool and brush on his hair, just below the hand that’s holding the sword up. Choose Layer Mask from the Output To pop-up menu, and click OK.
STEP FIVE:
Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to create a new blank layer under our existing Smart Object layer. Go to Edit>Fill and set the Use pop-up menu to Black, so that we have a similar background to fix our selection if we need to. Then, go back and work on the layer mask with the Brush tool (B) set to black or white to add or remove any areas that were missed by Refine Edge. I actually got a really clean selection the first time (especially on the hair) with this image, so there’s not much work to do.
STEP SIX:
Lastly, double-click on the Smart Object layer’s image thumbnail to go back to Camera Raw. Bring the Fill Light setting back down to 0 and click OK. You’re done with this photo now. I know there’s another photo with the woman, however, that one’s just going to be a faded background element in the photo, so we don’t need to select anything like we did in this photo. We’ll just fade it when we get to that point in the composite, and you’ll never see its background.
Creating the Composite
Most of the composites we’re creating in this book have a background and a subject, and our main goal is to put them together so they look like they were photographed together. With movie poster composites, we usually add more photos into the mix. But, as you’ll see here, we use many of the same techniques we’ve already covered to