Photoshop: Magnetic Lasso November 19, 2008

Continuing with the Twilight theme, let’s take our vampire and put him in the right setting. I’ve taken the original photograph that I want

to use and first made all the desired changes in the original photograph, such as adding the gaussian glow to make him pale and sephoric, creating the glowing eyes, and even get rid of any acne. Here is the progression of my vampire from the original to the finished product (without the background):

Now we’ll use the magnetic lasso tool to cut him out and put him wherever we want him to be. The magnetic lasso in the tools pallet with the other lasso options. The magnetic feature helps the computer figure out what you want selected. Especially with high contrasting colorings, the magnetic lasso will easily cling to an image. Just click anywhere on the path, release, and the lasso will follow the path of your mouse until you connect the end point to the starting point. You can click anywhere along the way to help put the points exactly where you want them. Use the toolbar at the top of the screen to make other adjustments. Feather will impact how harsh or soft the difference is between the image you are cutting out and the entire image as a whole. 

You don’t always have to have perfect precision with the lasso tool. After you have the image selected, you can turn on the Quick Mask Mode by clicking on the bottom icon in the tools pallet that looks like a front loading washing machine. With this selected, you can go back and adjust your image. Using the paint brush will include more of the image in your selection and using the eraser tool will exclude those parts of the image in your selection. Here you can see my progression:

The dark shadows on this image make it difficult to see where the body ends and where the shadows begin, but since I know I’m placing him into another dark image, I’m not very concerned about this. All I have to do with him now is use the Move tool (arrow tool at the top of the tools pallet) and drag his layer into another picture. In my example, I’ll drag him into the forest.

Photoshop: Twilight Eyes November 9, 2008

In honor of the upcoming premier of “Twilight”, I thought I’d share a technique in honor of the book/movie. With four images, I composited them together to make one image that kind of plays homage to the series. Here’s the play off:

The seperate images are of the “vampire”, wolf, moon and forest. There’s a lot that goes into photos like these and the more time you spend on the tiny details, the more authentic they look. I’ll tell you right now that I spent minimal time editing and adding the wolf. At any rate, these next few tutorials will break down the general methods of photo manipulation. Keep in mind, there are a hundred different methods to do the same action, so find what works for you. What is explained here might not work exactly right for you, but it’s always worth it to learn another method.

Let’s focus on the eyes.

Very, very easy, though it works best with light colored eyes. All you need to do is use the burn tool. You can play with the range to see which will get you the best result.

Zoom in (command +) and use a small brush over the iris.

*Note, the photo on the right has also been filtered with a diffuse glow. To do this, simply select the layer, go to Filter > Filter gallery. Diffuse glow is under the Distort folder.