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By Root 447 0

are lit, you can see that the light was coming from the left side of the image, so we are going to create a shadow on the right side of the player on the left and the player in the center. Start with the player on the left by clicking on his layer, then Command-clicking (PC: Ctrl-clicking) on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to create a new blank layer beneath him. Now, we’re going to need the selection of the football player, so Command-click on the layer mask we used as his selection to bring up the selection. Because we moved the layer to the left, your selection will also include the blank right side of the layer, so grab the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) and, while pressing-and-holding the Option (PC: Alt) key, click-and-drag around that area to remove it from the selection.

STEP NINE:

With your selection in place, go to Edit>Fill, then choose Black from the Use pop-up menu, and click OK. We’ll need to blur it a little, so go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, set the Radius to 8, and click OK. Now, since it’s a shadow, we’ll need to lower the layer’s Opacity to fade it a bit. Here, I lowered mine to around 45%. Then, because the light (from the sun) is coming from the top left, we want to make the shadow cast down and to the right. So, go into Free Transform again, move the shadow to the right, and change its angle. Now, we don’t want the shadow falling on the background, so grab the Eraser tool (E) and erase that area away. Do the same thing with the football player in the center, and make sure you rename your layers to keep them organized. The shadow next to the center player’s head was a bit too dark, so I set the Eraser tool’s Opacity to 10% and erased some of it away.

STEP 10:

There’s one last little finishing effect. Notice how bright the athletes look, from top to bottom. These were all taken outdoors in the middle of the day. Well, one thing about this composite is that we don’t show their feet. In fact, we want to draw people’s attention away from their feet and legs as much as possible. Remember, that’s one of the keys to compositing when someone’s legs or feet are in the photo—take the attention away from them. Now, when someone looks at this, we don’t expect they’ll even think it’s real, right? But anything we can do to take their focus away from the lower half of the athletes’ bodies (circled here) will help.

STEP 11:

Click on whichever layer is the top athlete in the image to target it (here, it is the football player in the center). Then, click on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to create a new layer above the athletes, but below the ellipses at the bottom, as seen here.

STEP 12:

Press D to set your Foreground color to black. Press G to get the Gradient tool, then in the Options Bar, click on the down-facing arrow to the right of the gradient thumbnail to bring up the Gradient Picker. Click on the second gradient from the left in the top row (Foreground to Transparent), and then make sure you have the Linear Gradient icon selected (the first icon on the left). Now, click-and-drag from the bottom of the image upward to about halfway from the top to create a gradient that’s black, but fades to transparent. You’ll see it darkens the lower part of the bodies. If it doesn’t look right, press Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z) to Undo, and try again. Remember, you just want to darken the lower part of their bodies, but the gradient shouldn’t go much higher than their waists. And, because the gradient layer is below the bottom ellipse layers, they look the same—we’re only darkening the athletes.

STEP 13:

Now, this made the football player on the left really dark. In fact, he’s too dark. So, let’s add a layer mask and mask him out. Bring back his selection again, and remove the right side of the layer from the selection like we did in Step Eight. Then, Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to mask just that selection. The edges of his pants are a little bright, so just grab the Brush tool, and with