Photoshop help needed.

Stella Bella

I have seen a couple of pictures on other sites that seem to incorporate 2 or more pictures merged together. For example, there was a picture where a woman took a self portrait of her doing three different things in her kitchen and then merged them together. The final product look like one kitchen and three of her doing different things. How would you get this effect. I understand that you would set your camera on a tripod and take three pictures with your subject in different places, but what would you do in PS after that to merge them all? TIA.

jfriend

Stella Bella wrote:

I have seen a couple of pictures on other sites that seem to incorporate 2 or more pictures merged together. For example, there was a picture where a woman took a self portrait of her doing three different things in her kitchen and then merged them together. The final product look like one kitchen and three of her doing different things. How would you get this effect. I understand that you would set your camera on a tripod and take three pictures with your subject in different places, but what would you do in PS after that to merge them all? TIA.

Here's one I did with my steps:

• Set camera on tripod
• Set exposure to manual and adjust it for proper exposure (you don't want the exposure to change from one shot to the next)
• Try to set up a scene where the background will not change at all (this will make the post processing a ton easier)
• Be careful of shadows
• Pose the first shot and take the picutre
• Repeat for all the other shots without moving the camera at all and try to make sure the subject that moves does not overlap from one photo to the next
• Take all the photos and load them into Photoshop in layers one on top of the other
• At this point all you will see is the contents of the top photo
• Create a mask for the top layer. In the mask, fill the mask with black, then with a soft brush paint white only on the unique position of your subject. You can use a brush with a soft edge and just paint generally over your subject. Since the background of all your shots should align perfectly, you don't have to do a careful mask. All you want to do here is to expose the whole subject in this layer (let it shine through the mask) and not paint over any area of the background that contains other positions of your subject (don't let this layer's background shine through any of the other positions of the subject from below)
• For each other layer except the bottom layer, repeat this same masking process, allowing that layer's unique subject position to show through, but not covering any of the subject positions below
• After you've done all the layer masks except the bottom one, you should be done
• Merge all layers up to a single new layer (I used Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E)
• Do any final post processing (color, contrast, brightness, sharpening) on the composite layer
• Save to JPEG

Here is one of mine I did for my nephew and his friend (they were trying to mimick an album cover they'd seen). This one was a little harder because the waves in the ocean did move from one image to the next so I had to so some hand blending of the background too.

The layer palette:


And the final image:

wxwax

Stack your photos and use Layer Masks to reveal what you want revealed.

Stella Bella

Thanks so much! I'm going to try it out in the morning!

Stella Bella

Tried it and it worked perfectly. thanks!

i_worship_the_King

will the photostitch do this?

jfriend

i_worship_the_King wrote:

will the photostitch do this?

Usually, photostitching is for combining several photos end-to-end to make one longer photo when the camera has moved to a new orientation between photos.

That isn't what we're doing here. Here a piece of the subject moves, not the background. It might be possible to use such a program for certain types of these projects, but it's very easy just using layers in Photoshop.

Stella Bella

here is my first try. just went to the backyard and tried it out.

leaforte

Nice job, first attempt.

sreejas

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