Sunday, August 2, 2009

Slightly embarrasing (I blame my sister!)

Confession time. Ok, so my sister and I have a small crush on Wentworth Miller. So she asked me to do a little superimposing project for her. Don't judge us! This is totally just for fun. And, she's divorced so she's allowed.

The photo Amanda gave me to work with was difficult to say the least. That head angle?!!

I think she chose this one for it's steamy romance novel quality.

She actually sent me the challenge before sending me the picture so I decided to play with one of my own pictures first so I could have Wentworth's floating head all ready to go...


Click to enlarge

I promise I don't spend my days lusting after "Michael Scofield"! Eric is my one and only hunky monkey. :)

How it's done:
You can't see it very well, but I've outlined his face with the polygonal lasso tool (feather: 1 or 2px). Then, just cut-and-paste and do any necessary editing. I placed and re-sized the floating head by temporarily decreasing the opacity so I could see Eric's face below Wentworth's and tried to match the size and angle.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to re-create the quality and lighting of professional celebrity photos, but I tried to do a few alterations to make it a little less noticeable. For example, my original photo was too warm so I desaturated it a bit...Wentworth's picture was taken in a dark room with artificial lighting so, although I couldn't remove the glow from his face, I did increase the brightness (just on his layer) so it looks a bit more like he's outside. I also had to copy and paste small sections of the door in the area around his head to cover up Eric's hair.

Ok, I'm really spending too much time on this silly post. :)

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Marquee tool (revisited)

I'm sorry! This post is about 2 weeks late, but I hope it's still helpful and demonstrates how ridiculosly EASY it can be to use the marquee tool. First, take a look at the screenshots below...

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Simple, no? Here are a few extra tips:

1. To start, I usually create my marquee directly over the subject I want to "hide" (in this case, Brynne & pup). This way, you can make it the perfect size. Then, just move the marquee over to a similar area (typically right beside the suject), and use that as your copy area.
2. After you paste, it may seem like nothing has happened. That's because your pasted layer is directly on top of the original layer - it still needs to be moved. In this case, to the right. (Also, the new layer should appear in your layers palette.)
3. It may take more than one copy or edit to make your cover-up look realistic. For example, in my photo, you can still see Brynne's head poking out from the top the pasted layer. To hide that, I just copied and pasted a few more slices from the grassy area closest to her head. I also used the burn tool to darken the line between the tall and short grass.
4. Next, I cropped the picture to keep it simple...no roads and telephone poles, just Paige and the lush green grass. (see below)

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5. Finally, I tried to enhance the photo itself (see final product in previous post). Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what I did, but I'll usually try out a few PS actions & some manual edits (hue/saturation, sharpness, selective color, etc.)