Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [70]
STEP ONE:
First off, you need a great subject doing something cool, different, fun, cute, whatever. But they just can’t be standing there doing nothing. These dancer photos are perfect. There’s lots of movement and they have a very dynamic look to them. But, it could just as easily be a martial artist, a football player, or even a child.
STEP TWO:
In fact, here are a few photos taken of some children on the same background. You can see the direction this is going, with the letters they’re holding. We’ll talk more about this one later in the chapter at the end of the compositing tutorial. I’ll show you a couple of different ways we can go with this type of composite.
STEP THREE:
The lighting setup is similar to some of the other setups in the book: a beauty dish in front as the main light, and two strip bank softboxes with grids on the sides. Here’s the absolute key, though: there’s a light pointed at the background here to turn it white. This way, we don’t need a new background for them later in Photoshop. They’re already on the background we want. This makes the time you spend on compositing a fraction of what you’d spend if you had to place them on a different background.
STEP FOUR:
Just a quick side note: You don’t have to shoot everything on white. The composite could just as easily have a black background, and it would work exactly the same.
RAFAEL CONCEPCION
STEP FIVE:
Finally, you’ll want to have the subject stand in the same general location and you’ll want to stay put, too. I tend to use a piece of tape on the ground (circled here). If either of you move closer or farther away, you’ll lose the correct height perspective. One photo will be larger than the other depending on which way you moved. It’s not the end of the world, though. We always have Free Transform in Photoshop to resize a photo, but again, I’m trying to save you some time later and this step is key to doing that.
Creating the Composite
Once you’ve got the photos, creating the multiple-pose composite is simple. In fact, this will probably be one of the easiest we create in the book, mainly because we really don’t have to worry about selections, backgrounds, or lighting. All that stuff is already done.
STEP ONE:
In Photoshop, we’ll need to get all of the images of the dancer into one document. There’s always the hard way, which is opening each photo and dragging them individually into one image. But Photoshop’s got a much easier way built in. Go to File>Scripts>Load Files into Stack. This opens the Load Layers dialog. Click on the Browse button and navigate to the photo series that you’ve captured, or just follow along by downloading the ones I’m using here. When you get to the Open dialog, click on the topmost photo and then Shift-click on the bottom one to select them all.
STEP TWO:
When you’ve got all of the photos selected, click the Open (PC: OK) button to go back to the Load Layers dialog. Then, click OK to start stacking them. When it’s done, you’ll have a new image open with several layers in the Layers panel.
STEP THREE:
Before we go any further, we need to make room for all of the photos. Go to Image>Canvas Size and change the unit of measurement to Pixels. Since we have five photos, we need to make the width of the image five times as wide. So, in this example, the Current Size Width reads 1000 pixels. Multiply that by 5 and you’ve got 5000 pixels (I always did well in math). So, type 5000 pixels in the New Size Width field, click OK, and Photoshop automatically adds some extra background area.
STEP FOUR:
You’ll notice that part of the background is transparent now. We need it to be white. Click on the Create a New Layer