One of the most exciting things about digital photography is not the camera itself, but what you can do with the photo after the fact using various software programs such as Photoshop Elements or CS3.

A popular thing to do is to take 2 or more images and merge them together forming a composite image. A person might add a bird, butterfly, or flower to a dramatic sky or they might add animals where there weren’t any previously. Sometimes different landscape elements are added such as a nice looking tree or rock outcropping, and sometimes it’s as simple as swapping out a boring sky for one that’s much more exciting.

It’s easy to add elements to a picture, but much harder to make them look right when all of the layers are put together. Photoshop’s Extract tool is a good place to start. It will help you remove an object from one image so that you can copy it into another. It does a decent job of getting the edges right, but you’ll need to fine tune it some. What I do is duplicate the layer, then extract the object out of the duplicate. I convert this new object to grayscale and copy it to a layer mask. A layer mask is a grayscale layer that allows portions of the layer below it to be shown. By converting the extracted layer to grayscale, I have a pretty good representation of the object that needs to be seen. I then paint on white and/or black to the edges of the layer mask to fix any edge problems in the original extracted layer. Once I have my perfectly extracted object, I can include that layer and its mask into the composite image and position it accordingly. Sometimes there are a few pixels that seem out of place once the layers have been combined, so I’ll fix those individually by zooming in to 500-1000% and then use the clone stamp tool to edit out the problems.

Extracting objects is really an art form all to itself. Give it a whirl sometime. To do so, you’ll need to know how to use the extract tool in Photoshop and how layer masks work, which I’m sure there are countless tutorials on the Internet that show you exactly how to use both. If you don’t have Photoshop, check to see if your photo editing software supports these things. If not, you can buy Photoshop Elements for about $99.

Doug Hough has a lot of really great composites, and the thumbnail in this article was created by Donwrob.

Tags: Digital Art, digital composites, photoshop

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 8:33 am and is filed under Art, Digital Art, Help, Photography, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.