In this quick workflow demonstration, I'm going to show you how I would create a
composite combining this image with this uh cow and this spaceship. Now the cow
and the spaceship come from a collection called the Humara photo clipart
collection. I purchased this from my favorite computer store. You get thousands
of images for like thirty dollars, something like that, very cool. And you can
use it for whatever you'd like, whatever nefarious purpose you'd like, and this
image comes from the cd, the special content cd, that comes with your Photoshop
CS3 install. So I'm going to hide this Humara, for now, I don't need that guy
and what I'm going to do is I'm going to do some drag and drop into this image
once I finish up preparing these images here. So the first thing I want to do of
course is get rid of the green and the maroon color and drag these images right
into this guy. So I'm going to go to my select menu and I'm going to choose
color range. With this command you get this dialog box and I'm going to click
with the eye dropper tool and right in the green and as you can see right away
it gives me an outline and this is the area that's going to be selected for me.
So I'm going to click OK and now it does a great job getting rid of all the green.
But what I want to do is I want to go to now select and I'm going to choose inverse
and now I'm going to drag Bessie right into this image with the move tool, so
I'm going to click and drag and there she goes, now put her down on the ground.
There is no grass there so she is eating the tarmac, not good for you Bessie. Now
I'm going to go ahead and just hide that for now, and I am going to do the same
thing with the spaceship. I'm going to go to the select menu, I'm going to
choose color range and I'm going to choose all that maroon there, click OK and
by the way guys I'm going very fast because you know I just want to show you a
demonstration as to how I would work. I would be more careful with my
selections in reality, so I'm going to drag and drop this right on into this
image as well. And once again I don't need the spaceship and now I can press F
on my keyboard to go to a nice full screen view. And I want to get my layers out
and I'm going to double click where it says layer two and name this UFO. And
we're going to name Bessie, Bessie. The traditional name for cows everywhere
approved by four out of five dentists. Now on the UFO layer I'm going to press
command or control T, so I can scale the ship down and move it into position.
And let's go ahead and double click to accept that. And what I'm going to do is
create another new layer and this is going to be my beam, because the ship is
going to beam Bessie aboard the ship, now whether they are going to talk or eat
the cow we don't know. These are UFOs man. So now, with my beam layer I'm going
to go ahead and expand my tools and grab my polygonal lasso and I'm going to
draw a beam from the ship to Bessie. And of course Bessie knows not what is
happening. Poor Bessie, we'll miss you man! Now I have my, my tract of beam,
alright, not very impressive. Now I'm going to change the color swatch color to
something like a greenish, light greenish color like this. And then I am going
to go to edit and I'm going to choose fill and then I'm going to choose the fill
with the foreground color and then I'm to deselect this by pressing command or
control D. And now I'm going to go to my filter menu and choose blur, gaussian
blur and as you see I, I have a nice blur already with the 17.3 pixel radius but
I can increase that or decrease it as I wish. I'll go ahead and accept that and
last but not least I'll drop the opacity down so I get this nice beam and now we
have this cool image created from three separate images and we have Bessie about
to be beamed up onto this ship for dinner as a guest or as the main course. So,
as you can see Photoshop works well with other applications where you can just
drag and drop images right on in. You can also get rid of any colors that are
around your other images. You can use tools such as the select menu to choose
color range, to select all your images. You can inverse the selection so you can
get exactly what you want and you can put them into your composite. Now one last
thing I'm going to do is give Bessie a shadow. Now let me show you how cool this
is going to be. This is very easy. I'm not going to do a very, very realistic
shadow of course. I'm going to choose Bessie, I'll make one more layer and I'll
put it underneath Bessie. I'll drag this layer down and I'll name it shadow. And
of course I double clicked a little too hard there. So I'll call this shadow and
I'm going to draw a shadow manually based on the color of this tarmac here and
I'll drop that down. And I'm simply going to grab my polygonal axle and I'm just
going to draw an outline of a shadow that I think will look good for Bessie. Not
the greatest shadow ever, but it'll work because we are going to blur it like we
did last time. So we are just going to draw the shadow out, going to fill it in,
the foreground color, I'm going to deselect it and once again I'm going to apply
a gaussian blur to that shadow. And now Bessie looks a little more cemented into
this environment because we have a nice shadow under the cow itself. So as you
can see Photoshop is quite handy, it can do quite a lot of things. And all you
have to do is really use your imagination because there is no right or wrong
technique. Now many people will have different ways of doing the same exact
thing, so having said that I want you to just enjoy Photoshop, learn as much as
you can and the number one secret to learning and mastering Photoshop is to
experiment. Bring in anything, bring in any picture you have, a coffee mug, your
Aunt Matilda, bring it into Photoshop add all kinds of filters, glow, special
effects and that's really the best way to master this application.
Adobe Photoshop CS3
Dwayne Ferguson
US$ 99.95
9 hours - 161 Movies
Win Vista XP 2000,ME. Mac OS X
Ground / 2 day / Next Day
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