Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [73]
STEP SIX:
Click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to create a layer mask. Then, press B to get the Brush tool from the Toolbox and, with your Foreground color set to black, use a medium-sized, soft-edged brush to paint away the duplicate background over the skater’s arm near the top of the image. Also, paint on the layer mask with black to hide the seam at the bottom on the sidewalk (I lowered my brush’s Opacity setting in the Options Bar a bit and gradually painted this area away).
STEP SEVEN:
We need to extend the sidewalk just a little more, so press Command-J to duplicate the layer we’ve been working on. Then, switch back to the Move tool and move that copy over toward the left as far as you can, while still making sure the sidewalk looks okay and no seams are showing. Again, don’t worry about the wall; we’re going to cover that up later.
STEP EIGHT:
Let’s merge everything together now by pressing Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) to create a new merged layer at the top of the layer stack, while keeping all of the layers below still there. Then, press J to select the Spot Healing Brush from the Toolbox, make sure the Content-Aware radio button is turned on up in the Options Bar, and use a small brush to paint away the two duplicate cast shadows on the sidewalk (as shown here). Zoom in and try to just paint over the actual shadow without spilling over on the rest of the sidewalk or rocks. Also, don’t kill yourself to make this perfect. We’re going to darken this area in the next tutorial, so you’ll never really see much of the sidewalk when it’s all done. Finally, go to File>Save and save the image as a PSD file.
Creating the Composite
The main idea for this composite is that we’ll have these cool swirl shapes following the skateboarder. Since the background image is also our main photo for the composite, our work mostly involves making a good selection of the skateboarder and replacing the texture behind him. Once we have that done, we’re free to add all the shapes and graphics we need (you’ll see that I recorded a video about using the Pen tool to add these shapes when you get to that part).
STEP ONE:
Open the extended background we created in the last tutorial (in case you didn’t follow along with the last tutorial, you can download the finished background from the book’s companion website and pick up right at this point). For starters, we don’t need all of the layers anymore, so go to Layer>Flatten Image, so you’re left with just the Background layer.
STEP TWO:
Using the Quick Selection tool (W), paint a selection on the skateboarder and his skateboard. He’s got a lot of tiny little details, so you’ll need to zoom in pretty tight here and use a small brush to paint in the details. Press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key while painting to remove any areas that you don’t want selected. When you’ve got the skater selected, click on the Refine Edge button in the Options Bar, then in the Refine Edge dialog, set the Radius to 5 pixels, and turn on the Smart Radius checkbox to help pick up some of those stray edges. When you’re done, choose Selection from the Output To pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog, so this will be output to a selection (rather than a layer mask, which is what we’ve been doing in most of the book).
STEP THREE:
Now that we’ve got our selection in place, we’re ready to add the textured background. We’re going to paste this background in, but first go to Select>Inverse to invert the selection. We don’t want to paste the background into the skateboarder; we want to paste it into everything but him.
STEP FOUR:
Open the textured background image. (Note: I’ve mentioned iStockphoto [www.iStockphoto.com] before as a great resource for design graphics and textures for your composites.