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Placing Someone Into a Disney Photo
By: Brian MacGowan
Get That Guy Out of There
The next step is to cut me and our youngest daughter out of the second
photo and then paste us into the first photo that has Sandy in it. The Freehand Selection Tool will do nicely for this:
I just ran a rough freehand selection around my daughter and me. I
was not too worried about any accuracy just as long as I got us in the selection. The excess will be erased in a future step. I
could have used the Rectangle Selection Tool but that would have grabbed too much image. The more you select, the more you have
to erase.
Once the selection has been made I used the standard Windows shortcut
CTRL+C to copy the selection to the Windows clipboard.
Don't Eat the Paste
Next, the photo containing my wife was brought into focus and then I pasted
the selection into that photo as a separate layer. This can be accomplished either through clicking on As New Layer in the Edit-Paste
window, or by using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+L.
A layer is like a transparent piece of acetate. Much like an animation
cel you can draw on some or all of the layer. Continuing with the animation analolgy, you can stack multiple layers on top of each
other in order to create depth.
We are using the layer for two purposes; first it allows for easier
movement of the image on that layer. If we had traditionally pasted the image, it would have been a little more difficult to move once
we had completed the paste command.
Some People Are so Transparent
The second reason for using layers is that layers can be opaque, 100% transparent, or varying degrees of transparency.
By making the layer that contains me and our daughter partially transparent,
it can be easily positioned into its proper location.
When the two images of our youngest daughter are a reasonable match,
the layer can then be set back to opaque.
Removing the Excess
The next step in the process is to erase the excess area from the new
layer. This is accomplished by using the Eraser Tool.
The Eraser Tool works best when used in a Size greater
than 5 and with a Hardness of 0. This will give you soft edges without any jaggedness.
I carefully erased around the image of me and our daughter; often
zoomed into the image by three or four times. I paid particular attention in the area between my wife and our eldest daughter. If
I erased too little or too much it would not look correct. It just takes a steady hand to do the erasing. It is not necessary to use
a pen and tablet to do precise work such as this, I use always use an optical mouse to do my most precise work.
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