Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [67]
Final Image
13. Single-Photo Composite
The single-photo composite is a great idea when you only have one photo to work with, but you want it to look like there’s more going on in the image. You’ll see this used a lot with sports photos, but I’ve also seen it used with regular portraits and even product ads. The idea is to make a copy of your original photo, make it way bigger, and fade it into the background. Because it’s faded, most people don’t really pay attention to the fact that it’s the same photo. Let’s take a look.
Single-Photo Composite
The beauty of this tutorial is its simplicity. Once you have a nice background to use, all you need is one photo. That’s it. With some creative use of multiple layers, blend modes, layer styles, and some text, you’ll have a catchy sports collage in no time flat.
STEP ONE:
Open the background photo. I’m using a texture downloaded from iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com), here. I found it by searching for “background texture.” If you’re into compositing, though, definitely keep your camera (it can even be a point-and-shoot camera) with you whenever you can. As you come across a cool-looking texture on a wall or floor, just grab a quick photo of it and start building your own background image library.
©ISTOCKPHOTO/MIROSLAV BOSKOV
STEP TWO:
Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and select Hue/Saturation. In the Adjustments panel, turn on the Colorize checkbox and then set the Hue to 49 and the Saturation to 8 to remove most of the color. By the way, this step is totally adjustable, depending on your background photo—sometimes it may work to leave more color in the photo and sometimes you’ll want to add color saturation. It really depends on the image, but in this example, I was trying to match the background with the pale gold color in the uniform of the faded version of the football player we’ll be placing here.
STEP THREE:
Open the photo of the football player now. Press W to get the Quick Selection tool and make a selection of the football player. The busier the background, the more important it is to get a good selection here. So, zoom in on his helmet and his hand carrying the ball, and make sure you have everything selected. Press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and paint to remove anything you don’t want included in the selection.
STEP FOUR:
Press the Refine Edge button up in the Options Bar. If you spent the time to create a good selection in the previous step, then there’s not much to do here. We don’t have any hair or many tiny details, so the Refine Radius tool won’t help much. Just set the Radius to 5 pixels and everything should be looking pretty good, then choose Layer Mask from the Output To pop-up menu, and click OK.
STEP FIVE:
Press V to get the Move tool and then click-and-drag the football player onto the background image. You’ll see the entire layer, with the layer mask, show up in the background image now. The photo is too large for the background, though, so go to Edit>Free Transform. But, because it’s so much larger than the image area, you won’t see the Free Transform handles, so press Command-0 (zero; PC: Ctrl-0) to automatically resize the window, so you can reach the handles. Then, press-and-hold the Shift key, and just click on a corner handle and drag inward to resize the photo. I dragged until the width and height settings in the Options Bar were about 80%. Press Return (PC: Enter) when you’re done to lock in the transformation, and then position the player in the center of the background.
STEP SIX:
Press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate the football player layer. We want to make the bottom copy really large and fade it into the background, so click on it in the Layers panel to target it, and then go to Edit>Free Transform, again. It’s going to be hard to use the transform handles to enlarge this as much as we want. So, instead, click on the Maintain Aspect Ratio icon in the Options Bar (the little chain link icon