First Project with Elements

Bassett1976

I'm really new to photography and my wife just got me Elements 5.0 for my birthday (cannot afford CS3). I took a pictures at the Air and Space museum in Los Angeles and wanted to put it on a sky background.




I'd love some comments on how to make this better. I think it looks cool but not 100% sold on it yet. I'm still trying to learn the Elements program and haven't figured out how to make the lines sharp when working with layers.

Thanks!

richtersl

This is a nice photo and I've attached a copy of what I was able to do with Photoshop Elements 3.0 in just a few minutes. Elements 5.0 should have the same features available, but they may appear on different menus.

From your description, you need to work on how to best select either the sky or the planes. A combination of the Magic Wand and Selection Brush tool would be your best bet on accomplishing that.

Basically, what I did was:

1. Used the Magic Wand tool with a tolerance of 40 to select the sky. Unfortunately some of the blue plane's nose got selected along with it.

2. Selected the Selection Brush tool with the Mode set to Mask. The planes both are masked in red.

3. Painted the blue nose red with the Selection Brush tool.

4. Chose Select > Inverse and then Select > Feather and entered 25. This will soften the plane selection just a tad to make the transition between the planes and the sky a bit smoother.

5. Choose Select > Inverse again and then Layer > New > Layer via Copy. This copies the sky to a new Layer.

6. Click on the Sky layer to make it active.

7. Choose Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Shadhows/Highlights and just played with the levers until I got the desired results.