Practical Photoshop September 2020

“Welcome to issue 114 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99?” If there’s one thing Photoshop does best, it’s combining photos. We’ve dedicated this issue to the skills and techniques you’ll need to master the art of amazing composites, from swapping backdrops to replacing heads, stitching sequences and more. www.digitalcameraworld.com DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES To download this issue's files, type the following link into your web browser on your PC or Mac: https://bit.ly/pho_114 FIND US HERE… http://bit.ly/practweet http://bit.ly/pracface Also available on: http://tiny.cc/4dw9ky http://tiny.cc/rew9ky http://tiny.cc/8ew9ky…

Replacing a background has to be one of the things that Photoshop does better than any other program. There are four stages to this: first we position the subject against a new backdrop; second, we select the subject; third, we make a mask; and fourth, we fine-tune the tones and add any other effects to bring the scene together into a believable whole… 1 DROP IN THE PORTRAIT Grab the Move Tool and drag the subject image to the new backdrop image. Here we’ve used a street scene downloaded for free from pixabay.com (search for seoul-5040704). Once your portrait is copied into the new backdrop, press Cmd/Ctrl+T to transform, then position and resize the layer until it’s in roughly the right place. 2 SELECT THE SUBJECT Go to Select > Subject (if the image…

If you have a sequence of photos taken in alignment like this (using a tripod is best) then you can easily combine them into a single frame. This is great for a rapid-fire action sequence, but you can use the same technique to craft a multiplicity portrait – where the same person appears in multiple places throughout the scene – or perhaps to remove annoying bystanders from your landscape scene by taking different versions where people are standing in different places. Highlight the sequence of images in Bridge, then go to Tools > Photoshop > Load Files Into Photoshop Layers (or in Photoshop, you can use File> Scripts > Load Files Into Stack). Hide all but the bottom two layers. Highlight the second-from-bottom layer, grab the Lasso Tool and make a…

1 MAKING A MASK To make a mask, we can either go to Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All/Hide All, or click the Add Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel. We can also Alt-click the icon to add a full black mask. If we first have an active ‘marching ants’ selection, that will be converted into a mask and any areas outside will be hidden. 2 THE MASK THUMBNAIL Once a mask is added, a Mask thumbnail appears on the layer next to the image thumbnail. To edit the layer mask, it’s crucial this thumbnail is highlighted - otherwise we might end up painting black over our image. We can Alt-click the thumbnail to toggle a mask view, and Shift-click to turn it off or on. 3 HIDE OR REVEAL Our…

This is one of those image-editing tasks that photographers and designers are increasingly asked to carry out. Dropping an image into a screen or a picture frame is very easy, but there are a few key points to nailing the effect. If the frame or screen is at an angle, it’s important to get the perspective right. We can use the Transform Tool to skew the layer to match it’s intended frame – we drag the image to its new backdrop, press Cmd/Ctrl+T to transform it, then hold Cmd/Ctrl and drag the corners of the bounding box to match up with the corners of the screen or frame we want to drop the picture into. We can also use blending controls to combine the dropped-in image with text and details on the…

With group photos, it can be tricky to get perfect expressions from everyone in a single frame, especially if children or animals are involved in the shoot. The trick when shooting a group shot is to fire off several frames for each pose. This way, you might be able to piece together a perfect shot where everyone is smiling and looking at the camera. It helps if the background is uniform like this, but even if it’s cluttered you might be able to replace a person’s head as long as the camera stays fairly still throughout the sequence of shots (if you’ve used a tripod, even better!). The key point here is to plot a line that will be the join point of your two frames. Here our incision runs through…